The original idea was that if a Psychiatrist sat down with someone and that person said "Hi I'm a (role name)," would the first thought be "this person is crazy" or "that sounds normal?" ... So if someone claimed their role was "Mailman" but they came back crazy, that would mean they were lying about their role.
There is... basically zero way that we'd have figured that out. I didn't even realise the role was named Psychiatrist, I just saw it referred to as the sanity seer.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Mafia or not I really do care about affected punctuation.
The original idea was that if a Psychiatrist sat down with someone and that person said "Hi I'm a (role name)," would the first thought be "this person is crazy" or "that sounds normal?" ... So if someone claimed their role was "Mailman" but they came back crazy, that would mean they were lying about their role.
There is... basically zero way that we'd have figured that out. I didn't even realise the role was named Psychiatrist, I just saw it referred to as the sanity seer.
You are an innocent villager! You win if all threats to the village have been eliminated, even if you are not still alive.
You are the Psychologist: Night Action: Diagnose a player. You will be informed whether that target is Sane. (Sane/Insane is based on a player’s role. It does not directly correlate to scum/town - some scum are Sane, some town are Insane. Sanity or lack thereof has no bearing on whether a player’s powers work as they are written.) (flavortext: You picked the right town to start a practice.)
With that last part being the part I missed when read my power. But it sounds like sanity has no bearing on the game at all.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I understood MP revealing in order to not kill off the vig, but it put us in an awkward spot of deciding if we believed him or not.
The No PMs was actually a detriment in this case, as I didn't really agree with the plan to shoot him via Burnage but I didn't have a great way of conveying it and getting Burnage's attention to kick out the discussion further. I tried to point towards Aura instead to test out JPant's results a little further, but it got buried under everyone else's comments, so there wasn't a good way to try and change that target.
All three of you were open about roles at that point, I don't see what PMs would have done to help there that you couldn't have done right in the thread, but I will admit to not knowing fully what everyone does with their PMs in a "normal" game.
I'm not blaming the No PM rule here. I still really like that rule. I'm just stating that it made the conversation more difficult.
I really didn't like the idea of shooting MP via Burnage. But with no PMs, I didn't have a means to push that conversation harder because everyone else in the thread disagreed with me and buried my objections.
That's not a game fault, that's just me telling MP that I agree that killing him didn't make sense.
If you'd voted out everyone who got embroiled in the discussion of the Oxford comma or everyone who posted more than twice about the N1 D&D game, you'd have hit like 80% mafia. Neither of those is a real reason you could push to vote someone out, but it would definitely be a warning flag to me that said "I need to watch this person and ask more questions of them." This person is clearly invested in the game to be posting this much and at length, but they're saying nothing of substance, which is a disconnect that feels like mafia to me.
This is a challenge of all Phalla games here, I think.
The people who are active are more likely to have non-villager roles, but if you always vote out the active, you're start encouraging the inactivity. I still agree with Disc that we should always fire at inactive first just because, someone who isn't contributing isn't helping the village. But it's obviously not the smartest game move because you're likely killing vanillagers due to it.
Hopefully behaviors can be changed so that everyone who plays wants to be active in the future, but I'd rather lose a game because of killing inactives and have a lively conversation the whole time than win a game where no one was talking because only inactives were left.
So, the sanity thing. That was a little bit of a holdover from a previous version of the game, which was a mostly-open setup, with a full list of roles and powers. The sanity checker (Psychiatrist) had a list of roles and what their sanity would check as, so it was a very weak info role that could try to figure out whether someone was lying about their claimed role. Grunt's Ghosts had a (Para)psychologist role, which was a sanity checker that always got the wrong results.
By not giving the list of roles and what the sanity results should be, I nerfed the sanity checker role pretty hard. OK, not a big deal, one or two effectively vanillager characters isn't going to sink the setup. The problem is that GG put the idea in everyone's head that sanity meant their powers didn't work as advertised. I don't know why GG said that - the role explanations for both sanity checkers specifically said that a lack of sanity did not mean that someone's power didn't work as written. And when clarification was asked for regarding whether powers worked as written, I couldn't say "of course everyone's powers work as written," because oops I made one role out of 23 that got backwards results for its checks. Coupled with a particularly devious choice by the mafia to send someone a message N1 saying that narrations couldn't be trusted...well. :X
As for whether this setup was significantly favored for the scum: when I've run or played similar setups before, it usually comes out slightly-to-moderately village favored. It was mentioned that the mafia was a higher proportion than usual for games around here, but I gather that you usually give the mafia two kills per night, and this mafia only got one kill per night, and three single use bonus kills: Puppeteer got to take someone with him, and the Werewolf and Vampire got to make bonus kills provided their respective Hunters weren't still alive. The mafia were also expected to get a bonus kill out of the Hopeless Romantic at some point, but they chose to shoot the HR directly for reasons they will have to explain. The town had some opportunities for bonus kills (Vigilante, and especially the Duelist which is a homing kill if you can just convince the mafia to shoot you) but that mostly didn't pan out. Another complaint was that you didn't know which teams dead players were on. Well, you should know about half of them right off the top (almost everyone who dies at night is town). Beyond that, there were also the three Hunters to let you know when particular mafia died, along with the Gravedigger to give you some delayed info about how well you were doing, a Vigilante who is learning a lot about the dead players based on whether or not it's getting to shoot, and a Coroner to help disambiguate night kills (if it hadn't been shot early).
It's easy for me sitting in the position where I know all the roles to say that people should have figured out the mafia, but two particular things jumped out at me as mistakes made or places people could have caught on:
1) using Burnage to kill MagicPrime as a test of both seems like a bad idea. It doesn't do any good to prove someone is town if you're killing them in the process. Especially when you have results from JPants right there pointing out one definite mafia and another probable mafia.
2) there was a point where someone made a list of people who had claimed roles and people who hadn't. IIRC the list of people who hadn't claimed roles at that point was JPants (arguably better than a seer), Brody (reveals as town when he dies), and...all of the remaining mafia. I definitely would have pushed harder on those folks who hadn't claimed, especially kime (didn't ever claim a power, I don't think?) and MrTLicious (claimed a massive amount of knowledge about the gamestate, but it had to be dragged out of him, and he didn't seem to be trying to use it to piece together who could be scum)
I think "sanity" was the biggest weapon against the village, to be honest. Part of that was GG's misreading of their role PM, and part of that was just they would have had to make several assumptions to even begin to gain valuable data from that. So it started as probably worthless, and then became horribly debilitating. The amount of wasted conversation and distrust that came from sane/insane is incredible.
I definitely agree with your last two points. Burnage shooting MP seemed like a really big mistake (not that we were gonna admit it :P ), and I also noticed that, like, the last three people to reveal were all mafia haha. Good thing no one bothered to call us on that! We all, including myself, did reveal eventually though. I just claimed "Ghost detector" like the existing vampire and werewolf roles.
It was fun, though, which is the most important. And I like the exploration of the different fundamental ways you could change the mechanics of the game. So again, thanks for running
For everyone, here are the mafia proboards!http://innocentvillagers.proboards.com/ Fair warning, I did the color scheme, so put on some sunglasses before you open it up
If anyone was curious, about half of the players requested "expert" mode, so I'll blame the confusing/debilitating Sanity mechanic on that. :P
For role distribution, the first thing I did was an equally weighted roll for who was mafia and who was town. Then I put all the mafia roles in a rough order from most complicated to least complicated, and created a table that had each mafia player's name listed. Anyone who had volunteered for Expert mode got their name added to the table multiple times, then I did a random roll to see which player got the first role, removed all of that player's entries from the table, and repeated with the next role. Similar process for the village roles.
Example table:
1-5 Expert maf player A
6-10 Expert maf player B
11-15 Expert maf player C
16 Regular maf player D
17 Regular maf player E
18 Regular maf player F
If I rolled a 7, player B got that role, remove them from the table so it was now
1-5 Expert maf player A
6-10 Expert maf player C
11 Regular maf player D
12 Regular maf player E
13 Regular maf player F
Once I'd gotten rid of most of the complicated roles, I then put everyone back to equal weighting.
Why'd I get Day 1'd?? Not that I'm complaining at this point
Obi needs to lay off the village abuse. I really hope it's not becoming your "norm" to call everyone idiots for voting for you. It's getting annoying and I was already dead for a couple weeks.
Since we voted out Mafia the last day, and the mafia won anyways, why wasn't the game called a day ago? Or Three days ago?
The specific mafia player you voted out made a big difference. By voting out Obi, you also killed a villager, chamberlain, who was his puppet.
By killing chamberlain, you also gave our werewolf a single-use kill.
So (not that you could have known this of course), voting out Obi actually gave us 2 extra village kills, and we still had our daily mafia kill. Since we were so close to winning already, that ratio was enough. If you'd have voted out premium (our werewolf) or something like that, things may have turned out differently (although still would have been hard for you).
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Oh, I meant prior to last night, we still had a chance of hitting a mafia with Austin, which kept us in the running. Tonight we would not have that option.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I don't think the village actually had a shot after the first couple of days. All the mafia had to do was vote in lockstep and since there were more of them than usual and we needed a majority of living peoples it would have denied us anything besides the vig. So every night we'd be killing either a villager or nobody. Also with the multiple lovers mechanics to increase the power of kills, all aimed at villagers. They didn't play that way, but it wasn't tilted in the villagers favor.
The game would have continued if the mafia had hit the Amulet of Protection with either of their N5 kills. Of course, that was out of the question once Austin handed the Amulet to MrT. :P
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WACriminalDying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered Userregular
What happened to @WACriminal ?
It seems like the Coroner role would have been the most straightforward role in this game, but instead he abandoned the gamr due to complexity...
Still think voting inactives out until the active powers had enough info to sort themselves out was a good call.
I didn't abandon due to complexity, i abandoned due to spending several days in the land of shitty internet and phone posting, then being busy at work when i finally returned. Sorry, guys.
What happened to @WACriminal ?
It seems like the Coroner role would have been the most straightforward role in this game, but instead he abandoned the gamr due to complexity...
Still think voting inactives out until the active powers had enough info to sort themselves out was a good call.
I didn't abandon due to complexity, i abandoned due to spending several days in the land of shitty internet and phone posting, then being busy at work when i finally returned. Sorry, guys.
Oh, I totally got the impression it was complexity as well haha. Hope you have more time to play in the future!
The game would have continued if the mafia had hit the Amulet of Protection with either of their N5 kills. Of course, that was out of the question once Austin handed the Amulet to MrT. :P
Yeah, like I said, MrT played this so well. There was no way I was killing him/voting him.
On the PM front I guarantee if I could have PM'd I could have gotten Austin to hand me the amulet the night I died and even with the sanity mechanic I think we would have had a chance then. Perhaps the Amulet wearer should have been able to open 2 way communication with one person (or one person per day/night/whatever)
I had Obi dead to rights and Aura and MrT up next (aura a little less cause of not being sure of chamberlain but MrT surviving the vote the day he did was a HUGE red flag). Not sure if I would have got premium or kime but they were pretty high on my list of suspects. I honestly thought we only had 4 or MAYBE 5 mafia based on previous distributions so I really didn't think we'd need to go further than Obi/MrT/[Auralynx|chamberlain].
And yeah, the sanity mechanic more than anything else screwed up the village. I'm pretty sure someone in thread (GG or 38th I imagine) said specifically that a role name won't imply if someone is insane or not. I remember cause Raiden mentioned his one way mason had a name that implied insanity and I thought he meant me (MAD scientist) until that "clarification".
As I said before, fun game. I'll agree with everyone who said it was incredibly stacked against the village (intentionally or thru confusion), but those games can be fun as well.
I'll second Austin's comment about enjoying the increased thread action. Thread inactivity is my biggest complaint about normal games (because as a vanillager that's usually all you have, especially in more vanilla games) and I loved that so much was forced into the thread here.
I'll agree that the day lengths really hurt the game. 24 hour day and 24 hour night would have been worlds better, and you *probably* could have gotten away with a 12 hour night (though that leads to varying close times which is probably bad).
And I'll even second the comment about Obi railing in the thread. I dislike calling out specific people like that but I'll just add that I was a bit put off by it too. I know there's very little "good" way to defend yourself as a mafia, and I've definitely seen Obi rage in a similar manner when *actually* getting voted out stupidly while being village, so there's the whole "play mafia like you do village" thing.... And Obi is DEFINITELY not the only one who has/does that... Yeah, i'll just leave it at that.
Anyway, fun game Fry! I'd love to play it again, with the sanity mechanic either dropped or refined into something meaningful. As it was it was just obfuscation essentially. ESPECIALLY without the ability to PM people to get them to reveal their role name.
The game would have continued if the mafia had hit the Amulet of Protection with either of their N5 kills. Of course, that was out of the question once Austin handed the Amulet to MrT. :P
Yeah, like I said, MrT played this so well. There was no way I was killing him/voting him.
This wasn't a game the village was going to win.
Oh so you hand it to him but not me, huh? /sniffles
Even after almost winning the vote? on the only day we didn't kill someone with it? (I have that last part right? pretty sure it was the first time in the game it happened, at least).
Oh so you hand it to him but not me, huh? /sniffles
Even after almost winning the vote? on the only day we didn't kill someone with it? (I have that last part right? pretty sure it was the first time in the game it happened, at least).
The night you died, I think I typed and deleted a PM to Fry to send the amulet to you probably a thousand times. I was sooooo close to passing it over, and I really regret not pulling the trigger.
The only reason I handed it off so easily last night was because since we hit Mafia, I was likely not getting a kill before the game ended, so me surviving didn't really matter anymore. When you died, it was right on that edge of me still providing some value and getting a kill and some death validation, so that's what caused me to hesitate.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
No results is a huge bonus for the mafia.
Extra mafia is a huge bonus for the mafia.
We made some bad plays as village.
Holy crap, the mafia all had powers too?
I'm not the best at balance, but with perfect players, mafia are supposed to be the square root of the total players?
We aren't perfect players, so the three standard power roles are brought in to balance things out against a standard powerless mafia.
Oh so you hand it to him but not me, huh? /sniffles
Even after almost winning the vote? on the only day we didn't kill someone with it? (I have that last part right? pretty sure it was the first time in the game it happened, at least).
The night you died, I think I typed and deleted a PM to Fry to send the amulet to you probably a thousand times. I was sooooo close to passing it over, and I really regret not pulling the trigger.
The only reason I handed it off so easily last night was because since we hit Mafia, I was likely not getting a kill before the game ended, so me surviving didn't really matter anymore. When you died, it was right on that edge of me still providing some value and getting a kill and some death validation, so that's what caused me to hesitate.
I figured you had at least thought about it. Especially since the information you get was "perfect" as in trustable, while we still hadn't figured out if mine was yet or not. If we had PM's i'm sure I could have convinced you.
Honestly the sanity confusion was more detrimental than the no PM's. Maybe even more than the oversized mafia. Without it I think we had a real chance.
Oh so you hand it to him but not me, huh? /sniffles
Even after almost winning the vote? on the only day we didn't kill someone with it? (I have that last part right? pretty sure it was the first time in the game it happened, at least).
The night you died, I think I typed and deleted a PM to Fry to send the amulet to you probably a thousand times. I was sooooo close to passing it over, and I really regret not pulling the trigger.
The only reason I handed it off so easily last night was because since we hit Mafia, I was likely not getting a kill before the game ended, so me surviving didn't really matter anymore. When you died, it was right on that edge of me still providing some value and getting a kill and some death validation, so that's what caused me to hesitate.
I figured you had at least thought about it. Especially since the information you get was "perfect" as in trustable, while we still hadn't figured out if mine was yet or not. If we had PM's i'm sure I could have convinced you.
Honestly the sanity confusion was more detrimental than the no PM's. Maybe even more than the oversized mafia. Without it I think we had a real chance.
Yeah, I agree. Sanity is what brought the village down.
I'm not the best at balance, but with perfect players, mafia are supposed to be the square root of the total players?
We aren't perfect players, so the three standard power roles are brought in to balance things out against a standard powerless mafia.
Everyone I talked to in my final "did I make any dumb mistakes" pass said that mafia should be between 1/5 and 1/3 of the players for a "no-flip", one-mafia-kill-per-night game (more maf with more power town roles, less with fewer town power or if there are SKs). "Square root of total players" seems like it's definitely wrong: 2 out of 4 is obviously wrong, 3 out of 9 is way too many mafs (town loses when they make their second mistake), 4 out of 16 is essentially the same ratio as what we just played, and you complained that it was too many mafia.
I'm not the best at balance, but with perfect players, mafia are supposed to be the square root of the total players?
We aren't perfect players, so the three standard power roles are brought in to balance things out against a standard powerless mafia.
Everyone I talked to in my final "did I make any dumb mistakes" pass said that mafia should be between 1/5 and 1/3 of the players for a "no-flip", one-mafia-kill-per-night game (more maf with more power town roles, less with fewer town power or if there are SKs). "Square root of total players" seems like it's definitely wrong: 2 out of 4 is obviously wrong, 3 out of 9 is way too many mafs (town loses when they make their second mistake), 4 out of 16 is essentially the same ratio as what we just played, and you complained that it was too many mafia.
I've never heard about the square root rule, I thought it was always generally 20-25%. With variations based on abilities, etc. Maybe it just turned out that they were often relatively equal for most of our games
I'm not the best at balance, but with perfect players, mafia are supposed to be the square root of the total players?
We aren't perfect players, so the three standard power roles are brought in to balance things out against a standard powerless mafia.
Everyone I talked to in my final "did I make any dumb mistakes" pass said that mafia should be between 1/5 and 1/3 of the players for a "no-flip", one-mafia-kill-per-night game (more maf with more power town roles, less with fewer town power or if there are SKs). "Square root of total players" seems like it's definitely wrong: 2 out of 4 is obviously wrong, 3 out of 9 is way too many mafs (town loses when they make their second mistake), 4 out of 16 is essentially the same ratio as what we just played, and you complained that it was too many mafia.
I believe 1/4 or 1/5 is standard around here. 6 mafia for a 30 player game sounds right. Adjust from there based on other balance factors. And if I had read one more post down I'd have seen that kime just said the same thing.
@Fry Don't forget to put a post in the signup that the game has completed so the next person can start one.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I got that figure from wikipedia, its with perfect players, so it probably only means something in computer simulations.
Then I did sqrt 30 in the calculator and assumed.
@38thDoe I'll ask now because I figured in game you may not have answered.
Who the heck was your Avatar?
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited October 2016
That's a recolor of King Edgar from FF VI I made for a buddy icon for AIM in college. It didn't have any meaning other than I thought the idea of changing avatars was kind of silly.
Fry, what was the deal with the witches not enraged post on the proboard?
Oh, we got 2 kills if enough of us were dead. I wasn't too worried about dying once I had my kill used up for that reason.
How many dead till that triggered? If it was like 1 or 2 living I could see that being ok but if it triggered at half.... I'd still put the villages odds (even taking out the sanity confusion) at significatnly less than even. Unless it was a one time extra kill..... but it sounds like a permanent extra nightly kill.
Also Gizzy/MrT's power on a mafia, in a low info game, seems like an over-correction against the "Vig lead village network" meta. Far, far too powerful for a game like this.
Edit: just wanted to reiterate - even though I'm pointing out and agreeing with a lot of balance issues, I still think this game was exceptionally fun and would play in a similar one again in a heartbeat.... though maybe with adjusted day/night lengths. 24/24 would work, though the lack of game related talk for every other day would still be a big damper on activity. Not sure how to solve that one. Maybe each night every player is assigned one other player at random they can PM with for that night only. Might pair villagers with mafia. This would keep people active/interested while negating some of the "no PMing" issues that people have brought up. Still limited communication, though not to the same degree.
I think the no pm system was fun, but the long days and no info nights lead to a lot of "spam" that made picking up on things really hard. Personally I don't have time to read 200 posts for a phalla game every night, especially when the vote closes when I'm at work.
I don't think this experiment quite worked, but I'm thankful for you hosting and trying out new things here Fry.
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The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
There is... basically zero way that we'd have figured that out. I didn't even realise the role was named Psychiatrist, I just saw it referred to as the sanity seer.
That's what it sounded like in the PM.
With that last part being the part I missed when read my power. But it sounds like sanity has no bearing on the game at all.
I'm not blaming the No PM rule here. I still really like that rule. I'm just stating that it made the conversation more difficult.
I really didn't like the idea of shooting MP via Burnage. But with no PMs, I didn't have a means to push that conversation harder because everyone else in the thread disagreed with me and buried my objections.
That's not a game fault, that's just me telling MP that I agree that killing him didn't make sense.
This is a challenge of all Phalla games here, I think.
The people who are active are more likely to have non-villager roles, but if you always vote out the active, you're start encouraging the inactivity. I still agree with Disc that we should always fire at inactive first just because, someone who isn't contributing isn't helping the village. But it's obviously not the smartest game move because you're likely killing vanillagers due to it.
Hopefully behaviors can be changed so that everyone who plays wants to be active in the future, but I'd rather lose a game because of killing inactives and have a lively conversation the whole time than win a game where no one was talking because only inactives were left.
I think "sanity" was the biggest weapon against the village, to be honest. Part of that was GG's misreading of their role PM, and part of that was just they would have had to make several assumptions to even begin to gain valuable data from that. So it started as probably worthless, and then became horribly debilitating. The amount of wasted conversation and distrust that came from sane/insane is incredible.
I definitely agree with your last two points. Burnage shooting MP seemed like a really big mistake (not that we were gonna admit it :P ), and I also noticed that, like, the last three people to reveal were all mafia haha. Good thing no one bothered to call us on that! We all, including myself, did reveal eventually though. I just claimed "Ghost detector" like the existing vampire and werewolf roles.
It was fun, though, which is the most important. And I like the exploration of the different fundamental ways you could change the mechanics of the game. So again, thanks for running
For everyone, here are the mafia proboards! http://innocentvillagers.proboards.com/ Fair warning, I did the color scheme, so put on some sunglasses before you open it up
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
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You asked for and received clarification about that before I had even sent all the role PMs out, so GG got the "fixed" version.
For role distribution, the first thing I did was an equally weighted roll for who was mafia and who was town. Then I put all the mafia roles in a rough order from most complicated to least complicated, and created a table that had each mafia player's name listed. Anyone who had volunteered for Expert mode got their name added to the table multiple times, then I did a random roll to see which player got the first role, removed all of that player's entries from the table, and repeated with the next role. Similar process for the village roles.
Example table:
1-5 Expert maf player A
6-10 Expert maf player B
11-15 Expert maf player C
16 Regular maf player D
17 Regular maf player E
18 Regular maf player F
If I rolled a 7, player B got that role, remove them from the table so it was now
1-5 Expert maf player A
6-10 Expert maf player C
11 Regular maf player D
12 Regular maf player E
13 Regular maf player F
Once I'd gotten rid of most of the complicated roles, I then put everyone back to equal weighting.
Touche
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Obi needs to lay off the village abuse. I really hope it's not becoming your "norm" to call everyone idiots for voting for you. It's getting annoying and I was already dead for a couple weeks.
Thanks for running something different Fry!
Confusion will be my epitaph
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The specific mafia player you voted out made a big difference. By voting out Obi, you also killed a villager, chamberlain, who was his puppet.
By killing chamberlain, you also gave our werewolf a single-use kill.
So (not that you could have known this of course), voting out Obi actually gave us 2 extra village kills, and we still had our daily mafia kill. Since we were so close to winning already, that ratio was enough. If you'd have voted out premium (our werewolf) or something like that, things may have turned out differently (although still would have been hard for you).
Well, no, I don't think? YOu voted out Obi, a mafia member, during the Day. That meant that Austin's ability was no longer active that Night.
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The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I did like no PMs
I didn't abandon due to complexity, i abandoned due to spending several days in the land of shitty internet and phone posting, then being busy at work when i finally returned. Sorry, guys.
Oh, I totally got the impression it was complexity as well haha. Hope you have more time to play in the future!
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Yeah, like I said, MrT played this so well. There was no way I was killing him/voting him.
This wasn't a game the village was going to win.
I had Obi dead to rights and Aura and MrT up next (aura a little less cause of not being sure of chamberlain but MrT surviving the vote the day he did was a HUGE red flag). Not sure if I would have got premium or kime but they were pretty high on my list of suspects. I honestly thought we only had 4 or MAYBE 5 mafia based on previous distributions so I really didn't think we'd need to go further than Obi/MrT/[Auralynx|chamberlain].
And yeah, the sanity mechanic more than anything else screwed up the village. I'm pretty sure someone in thread (GG or 38th I imagine) said specifically that a role name won't imply if someone is insane or not. I remember cause Raiden mentioned his one way mason had a name that implied insanity and I thought he meant me (MAD scientist) until that "clarification".
As I said before, fun game. I'll agree with everyone who said it was incredibly stacked against the village (intentionally or thru confusion), but those games can be fun as well.
I'll second Austin's comment about enjoying the increased thread action. Thread inactivity is my biggest complaint about normal games (because as a vanillager that's usually all you have, especially in more vanilla games) and I loved that so much was forced into the thread here.
I'll agree that the day lengths really hurt the game. 24 hour day and 24 hour night would have been worlds better, and you *probably* could have gotten away with a 12 hour night (though that leads to varying close times which is probably bad).
And I'll even second the comment about Obi railing in the thread. I dislike calling out specific people like that but I'll just add that I was a bit put off by it too. I know there's very little "good" way to defend yourself as a mafia, and I've definitely seen Obi rage in a similar manner when *actually* getting voted out stupidly while being village, so there's the whole "play mafia like you do village" thing.... And Obi is DEFINITELY not the only one who has/does that... Yeah, i'll just leave it at that.
Anyway, fun game Fry! I'd love to play it again, with the sanity mechanic either dropped or refined into something meaningful. As it was it was just obfuscation essentially. ESPECIALLY without the ability to PM people to get them to reveal their role name.
Oh so you hand it to him but not me, huh? /sniffles
Even after almost winning the vote? on the only day we didn't kill someone with it? (I have that last part right? pretty sure it was the first time in the game it happened, at least).
The night you died, I think I typed and deleted a PM to Fry to send the amulet to you probably a thousand times. I was sooooo close to passing it over, and I really regret not pulling the trigger.
The only reason I handed it off so easily last night was because since we hit Mafia, I was likely not getting a kill before the game ended, so me surviving didn't really matter anymore. When you died, it was right on that edge of me still providing some value and getting a kill and some death validation, so that's what caused me to hesitate.
Extra mafia is a huge bonus for the mafia.
We made some bad plays as village.
Holy crap, the mafia all had powers too?
I'm not the best at balance, but with perfect players, mafia are supposed to be the square root of the total players?
We aren't perfect players, so the three standard power roles are brought in to balance things out against a standard powerless mafia.
I figured you had at least thought about it. Especially since the information you get was "perfect" as in trustable, while we still hadn't figured out if mine was yet or not. If we had PM's i'm sure I could have convinced you.
Honestly the sanity confusion was more detrimental than the no PM's. Maybe even more than the oversized mafia. Without it I think we had a real chance.
Yeah, I agree. Sanity is what brought the village down.
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Everyone I talked to in my final "did I make any dumb mistakes" pass said that mafia should be between 1/5 and 1/3 of the players for a "no-flip", one-mafia-kill-per-night game (more maf with more power town roles, less with fewer town power or if there are SKs). "Square root of total players" seems like it's definitely wrong: 2 out of 4 is obviously wrong, 3 out of 9 is way too many mafs (town loses when they make their second mistake), 4 out of 16 is essentially the same ratio as what we just played, and you complained that it was too many mafia.
I've never heard about the square root rule, I thought it was always generally 20-25%. With variations based on abilities, etc. Maybe it just turned out that they were often relatively equal for most of our games
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I believe 1/4 or 1/5 is standard around here. 6 mafia for a 30 player game sounds right. Adjust from there based on other balance factors. And if I had read one more post down I'd have seen that kime just said the same thing.
Then I did sqrt 30 in the calculator and assumed.
Who the heck was your Avatar?
It's covered in your role PM. It's a catchup mechanic for if the witches fall very, very far behind.
Oh, we got 2 kills if enough of us were dead. I wasn't too worried about dying once I had my kill used up for that reason.
How many dead till that triggered? If it was like 1 or 2 living I could see that being ok but if it triggered at half.... I'd still put the villages odds (even taking out the sanity confusion) at significatnly less than even. Unless it was a one time extra kill..... but it sounds like a permanent extra nightly kill.
Also Gizzy/MrT's power on a mafia, in a low info game, seems like an over-correction against the "Vig lead village network" meta. Far, far too powerful for a game like this.
Edit: just wanted to reiterate - even though I'm pointing out and agreeing with a lot of balance issues, I still think this game was exceptionally fun and would play in a similar one again in a heartbeat.... though maybe with adjusted day/night lengths. 24/24 would work, though the lack of game related talk for every other day would still be a big damper on activity. Not sure how to solve that one. Maybe each night every player is assigned one other player at random they can PM with for that night only. Might pair villagers with mafia. This would keep people active/interested while negating some of the "no PMing" issues that people have brought up. Still limited communication, though not to the same degree.
I don't think this experiment quite worked, but I'm thankful for you hosting and trying out new things here Fry.