Cythare has died. He was a level 23 Dancer White Mage
Over the course of the next night cycles, the fiends destroy the remaining two heroes.
Bur has died. He was a level 18 Time Mage Blue Mage
jskura has died. He was a level 23 Thief Black Mage
The remaining fiends celebrate their victory.
Askthepizzaguy, the level 26 Fighter Ninja Fiend has survived with 34 HP.
KamikazeArchon, the level 24 Thief Ninja Fiend has survived with 74 HP.
KoolKoal, the level 24 Black Mage Fiend has survived with 19 HP.
Kefka_NPC, the level 4 monster disappears into the ether.
FINAL_BOSS_NPC, the level 5 monster disappears into the ether.
Congratulations to KoolKoal, Askthepizzaguy, KamikazeArchon, Megiddo, Vezokpiraka (r. Hunger, r. Gentleman Johnny), and Wheat_Grinder for a mafia victory!
Thank you all for playing! This game was very close, up until night 13. In the words of Megiddo:
"Ok after looking at this I put scum winning at like... 20% right now. We need to get very lucky to win."
...then after Sepiriel's misvig of MisterSins instead of KoolKoal: "well chances of scum victory just literally doubled."
Town MVPs Sepiriel -- The early calling of Wheat set the town on the right track.
Cythare -- Picked up where Sepiriel left off, hunting down the mafia wherever they hid!
HookerPunch -- For literally giving the town a second chance at life. We never expected that the mafia would let this role revive nine players.
Bur -- For really diving into the mechanics of the game and asking me so many questions!
Mafia MVPs Askthepizzaguy -- After spending 5 game days needing to be replaced, we couldn't find enough replacements, and he stuck through to the end. He broke the lid on many of the game mechanics, predicted people's actions like a hawk, and convinced nearly everyone that he was town to the bitter end.
KamikazeArchon -- ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Don't receive any votes for 14 game days straight.
KoolKoal -- For the best "lurking in plain sight" performance.
Honorable Mention DanteRossetti -- a complete newbie to the site, got randomed into the hardest role of the game, and took the bull by the horns. Survived a long time!
Designing this game was tough, and it took years of on-and-off thinking between me and Dan. There were so many things we learned from Final Fantasy 1 Mafia and Eeveeloution Mafia. At some point, I felt that incorporating all of our lessons learned was impossible, but Dan saved the day, giving me a lot of math to show what needed to be balanced for everything to work.
Our one biggest mistake was that we accidentally gave everyone 10 extra HP at the beginning of the game. For the early game slog, we apologize!
I'm not going to do another HP-based game. I've probably spent about 200 hours modding this game, and that's a LOT. There's definitely room for improvement to the fine-tuning of a HP-based game, but I think we've reached the limit of what can be done with HP-based games as a general concept. We've learned from our mistakes, and created something that is swingy but balanced. And that leaves me satisfied, regardless of which team wins.
Near the end of this game, I started designing a much simpler "class-focused" leveling system for a Mafia game. No HP, no attack power -- just a straight-up voting system (with one potential modification). If something comes of it, I'll let you know!
I've said most of what I wanted to in the spec chat, but here's my thoughts in quick digestible form:
This game wasn't mafia, and unfortunately it became a slog that was hard for me and a lot of others to get into. I really wish it had been more fun, because the setup, roles, etc. looked awesome and I appreciate the great care that went into the design. One side of me wants to heap praise, the other wants to just walk away.
I wish I had been able to get my head into the game earlier than I did. By the time I was able to start contributing it was way too late and I was a dead man walking. Sorry to my team for not pulling my weight here.
On the same note, Pizza my man holy hell how in the world do you manage to put so much effort into these games? You had over 700 posts... and like half of them were just walls.
When I said the scum's chances "doubled" there, really it was more like quadrupled. Our sudden loss of Vezok was really bad for us because it removed our way to deal with Hooker's revived townies. At that point our resources were stretched really thin, and there were more targets to remove than we had kills (as the revived players could increase their HP it really became a race to keep up). The thing that I was biting my nails about in the spec chat was MrSin's L5 summon. As we saw in the last game Day, the damage prevention aspect was not really public. There was no indication of what caused that prevention, and I was afraid that it would not be obvious what was causing it and that we would waste damage. At best it would have demanded an assassinate, which were in short supply by the end of the game. But then every fear I had evaporated in one glorious Night.
I have no gripes past what I've already said. Thanks for playing with me, everybody!
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Can we have Megiddo removed from the forum forever please?
i'm pretty sure i can find your ***** online within 3 minutes
Finally, Garland has some special rules of his own:
* He can't gain HP
* He gains 2 levels per night
* He may use an extra move each night
* As a being of chaos, if a player uses a special move to learn Garland's class or any stats or skills, they won't learn the truth. At any time, Garland may PM the mod with what he wants an investigation to return. If he doesn't choose anything, it will be randomized (the stats will match his level/2).
Regarding the fact that the time limit for game days is much shorter than a regular game: Running through scenarios in our head, we quickly figured out that, because players start off weak in the early game, player interest would suffer. We had two choices: Increase everyone's power across the board, or speed up the day/night phases. Increasing everyone's power across the board practically ruins the elegance of the levelling-up system, which aids in not punishing early-game mistakes for either team. So we decided to make game days go fast: one RL day per living player. It encourages players to actively use their vote power and remain engaged in the game. Plus, the night abilities make up for weaker attacks during the day.
Regarding HP balancing: Most classes start at 2 attack power. Originally we had everyone start at 1 attack power but realized that the power increase from 1 to 2 is way too significant. So we bumped almost everyone up to 2 attack power, and doubled everyone's HP to make up for it. (SEPPELNOTE: Yet somehow we accidentally added +10 HP on top of that...)
Regarding the risk of the Blue Mage with Level X Dance levelling his skill up: It's a risk/reward factor. He may just want to stop at the level 3 roleblock, or risk it all and go for the level 5 doom. Players will be claiming, and everyone levels up once per night anyway, so a Level 5 Doom is going to hit a player eventually. It's also handy for catching players in lies. Side note: Level X Dance was inspired from FF6 with Level 3 Muddle, Level 4 Pearl, and Level 5 Doom.
Regarding the Summoner: Aside from the level 5 summon which protects the black mage, none of that seems like a problem. It might be a little more balanced if the Level 5 summon acted like a bodyguard instead of a doc, but I really think the town needs all the help it can get. In an RPG Mafia Game, killing the smartest players first is an even higher priority than normal, since everyone is a mini-vig, at the very least, leaving less room for investigative roles to be useful.
Regarding town optimization: The town is always going to play sub-optimally. However, they have a lot of non-damage night abilities that hopefully will make up for that.
Regarding the Mafia choosing what abilities to level up: It would probably be optimal to have two Mafiates level Assassinate just in case one of them goes down. The Mafia has a lot of options when it comes to building, and it's up to them to determine their best skillset.
Regarding the fact that this is a 24-player setup that was developed before the change to reel full games back to ~18 players and as such, the game might get hard to track, even with two mods: The mechanics aren't that hard to keep straight (day is basic attacks, and night is resolved all at once).
(This section assumes some old setup data, like Assassinate dealing 10/20/30/40/50 damage with no recoil)
Most commonly, a class tops-out its damage ability at 7 SP (which is attainable no later than Day 9/Night 9). The first FF mafia ended on Day 6, so while this game's Day/Night cycle is less powerful but faster, we can call these numbers theoretical maximums, at 7 SP.
We have three distinct tiers: 5 damage, 9 damage, and ~15 damage.
There are 18 available slots (50%) in the 5 damage tier.
There are 4 available slots (11%) in the 9 damage tier.
There are 14 available slots (39%) in the ~15 damage tier.
This averages out to approximately 9 damage. With an average starting HP of 40, this equates to 5 "votes" to kill (assuming someone uses their vote and night ability (if relevant) to deal damage to the same player). This makes using 1 SP for a +10 HP increase make sense as "I need 1 more vote to be killed." This is good for scum, not so good for townies who can be killed right away with Assassinate -- iLord and Guardman were right to make the mafia nightkill deal damage to a mafiate, so I want to add "Deal 5 damage to yourself." to the end of each level of Assassinate. This balances out the need for extra HP to "less important than everything else" for both teams (irrelevant for Garland).
In other words, players start off underpowered, but end up balanced in the endgame.
Downside: The first day/night cycle will likely not have a dead body.
Fix: We make the time limit for D1 shorter than regular D1 to keep players interested.
e.g. Day 1 will last only 2 weeks. Every game Day after that will have a time limit of 24 hours * # of living players.
I think the only thing we need to watch out for when randomizing the roles is to evenly distribute the heavy-hitting roles and the weak-hitting roles across the teams.
Side-note: I'm reducing the level requirement to gain a dual-class to 10 because 20 is absolutely unlikely, but 10 may come around.
With that out of the way, I think the only thing left is balancing the mafia nightkill. Assuming the mafia's possible maximum power:
1 Fiend = Likely to carry out the nightkill. 55 max damage.
1 Fighter Fiend = 15 Max Damage
1 Thief Fiend = 9 Max Damage
1 White Mage Fiend = 5 Max Damage
1 Black Mage Fiend = 14 Max Damage
1 Time Mage Fiend = 5 Max Damage
That's 103 damage possible by Day 9.
Garland's max is 24 damage.
Now let's calculate the town's power:
9 possible @ ~15 Max Damage
1 possible @ 9 Max Damage
7 possible @ 5 Max Damage
That's 179 damage possible by Day 9.
This puts the anti-town power at 127 versus the town power at 179.
At full power, the town forces can kill 4.5 players per day/night. The anti-town forces could potentially kill off 3 townies per day/night cycle, which reduces the town power by ~1.25 kills.
In other words, one full day/night of the town attacking scum means the town is very likely going to lose.
Note that even if a mafiate kills himself from use of Assassinate, there will always be another to take his place as the Assassinator, meaning the Mafia's minimum max damage is still 55, and could easily kill two townies in a three-way.
What if we lowered the mafia nightkill damage to 10/15/20/25/30 (and reducing the recoil to 1/2/3/4/5 damage to self)? That reduces the anti-town max potential to 83 damage per day/night, or about 2 kills per day/night.
That gives the town approximately two full days of full-power screwups before they are close to auto-losing. That feels a lot more fair.
These changes feel closer to the whole "three mislynches before losing" concept.
I am so sorry to everyone for blowing up the way I did early-game. I was stupidly pressed for time and absolutely loathe repeating myself, and the game, itself, was a horrible slog, as Megiddo already stated. I re-read part of the game and wanted to not ever do anything like that ever again.
With 7 mafia and an SK, there was absolutely no way that the town was ever going to win this game. Sorry, Seppel, but I don't think you gave us nearly enough margin for error. That said, I appreciate all of the effort that went into this game, so thank you for putting all of the hard work into it that you did!
Special thanks to Pizza for sticking through the whole game with boatloads of effort, and for even coming to MTGS to play with us, to begin with. I hope you return for more games that are actually played like Mafia - this was obviously an exception to that.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
I'm pretty proud that I managed never to hit scum with my Wisdom.
The 3 remaining scum really deserved this victory.
It was hard to not trust Pizza with all the effort he put in. I managed to scumread him a few times, but went back on it every time. I learned that gut > brains when reading him.
KoolKoal put in just enough effort. He would've been poe'd eventually, but he did well staying quiet when town was eating itself.
Kami did a great job staying under the radar too.
I wonder if things would've gone any differently if I wasn't on full vl/a when I got raised. I knew KK or Pizza had to be responsible for that Chris-killing summon. But I think by then it was already too late.
Well, you did Wisdom my Stun Strike at one point, so I knew it was pointless to invest more points in it. That's why I stopped at level 3.
Doesn't really matter.
Rhand, you along with Sir Chris (etc, not trying to overlook anyone...) were townies with not-really-fearsome action abilities that were fearsome just because of the incredible bull***** sensors you have installed in your brains. I needed you dead because you'd defeat us with thinking and speaking alone. Not the damage you inflict with your vote, or the actions you do at night, just the fact that you were solving independently and often correctly.
You were among the town's finest. I was never more worried about resurrected townies winning the game against us than when Sir Chris resurrected and when you were resurrected.
What you brought to the game might not have been your personal best game of all time, but- I think the scum quicktopic highlights how much I personally feared for my life when you really began to engage mid-to-late game, and I'm almost certain if we hadn't killed you when we did (both times) you'd have solved it decisively for town. I needed you silenced for scum to win, and keep in mind the other townies with crazy powerful abilities that I neglected in order to kill you dead.
Really enjoyed playing with you (and so many others) because you were an intensely challenging opponent.
I was invited/pestered by Thingyman to join that mafia championships thing, and that's where I met Iso.
I mislynched Iso on the first round of the championships based on an idea that the guy he was attacking wasn't scum, and he was being unreasonable about pushing that case on someone I had decided was townie. Yeah, well, since Iso was also innocent, I didn't exactly do any better on that round. I also felt bad because my fingerprints were all over that lynch and the alternative that it ended up being was one of the scumbags. And personally I felt bad because Iso clearly has passion for the game and I helped kill him off and it wasn't a typical game, it was a tournament. He didn't get the same chance the rest of us did to redeem himself. I own up to my mistakes. Any choices I make which have bad consequences are always my fault.
After the game, I wanted to shake his hand and apologize to him personally and his entire forum for removing their champion. I hoped that I would make it up to you fine folks and especially him by playing in another game with him as a way of showing respect and making amends.
I did not anticipate what in the blue hell I was signing up for.
___________________________
Much, much more rambling thoughts:
When the game began, I was faced with a talkative and unfamiliar player base, very long rounds, and not a whole lot of the usual stuff I look for to engage in a mafia game. The voting system meant you couldn't change your "vote" once placed, and attacks caused permanent damage. Now, I am comfortable with such an environment, but the unfamiliarity compounded with the length of phases. I had never ever ever before conceived of phases that long, by an order of magnitude.
So, after I discussed a little and made an attack and some short interactions, and declared my intention to speed things along to the first flip, where I could begin analysis, which is my bread and butter, the day continued for like 2 weeks.
I began to zone out, and also, I began to feel like I truly was a fish out of water. I don't know how to play unless my vote has some weight and once placed, it's done. So I had no vote and felt like I had little influence on things. I might have been scum but I didn't know my teammates that well yet and they didn't know me and we hadn't really spoken much yet. So I did what I almost never do, and I played the waiting game.
Then, an event occurred offsite that made me really want to quit. Not only had Sooh (Mojito_Fun) quit the game because she definitely could not play a game with phases this long, who was my one truly familiar face, but I had been modkilled during a game I worked really really hard on under circumstances I am convinced to this day were unfair (my possibly biased opinion and I don't wish to debate it).
I asked the mod to replace me, for real, and I was dead serious. This was not a gambit or a bluff, I don't metagame the game in that manner, because it is cowardly. I really did request to replace out, and had Seppel the replacement players right then and there, I'd have been replaced out and you all would probably not have seen me again.
But no replacements were forthcoming for a while. And I do not abandon my teammates, town or mafia. So while I declared my replace out I continued to vote and provide minimal input on the game so the team I was on would not suffer for my own lack of desire to play any mafia game. There were a number of others who needed replacement on the town side, and at least one on the scum side, and since my reasons for replacing out were me being emo and whiny and not in the mood to play, as opposed to others who might have had emergencies or RL situations, I felt like the best thing I could do here was tough it out for my team and also the game host, who worked hard to assemble this game and run it.
Against my strong desire to leave, I noticed that my team was under a lot of pressure at one point, and that I wasn't, and that I had been able to get read by the majority of the people as a townie. So, I thought, I might actually be one of my team's "Deep" wolves.
If I'm critical to my team's eventual success, one of the harder scumbags to find, even though I hadn't done much yet, it's all that much more imperative that despite how I was feeling, and despite the unfamiliar landscape, I reach down deep and try hard. I challenged myself to gut it out for my team, and for the game itself.
But, one thing had to change:
I absolutely could not show up in the thread, and speak to no one in a real time manner, and leave, and feel like I was part of a community.
I began demanding of myself, and of everyone who visited this thread, that we begin a real dialogue, and make an effort to show up in the thread and STAY in the thread for a while and speak in real time to the folks who were there.
That element was lacking particularly during the hours I tended to log on. Some had done so, especially during other times of the day, but it was often a large collection of folks posting and then leaving and the back-and-forth was limited.
It was even hurting town's morale, even though they were kicking ass finding a scum right away and others were looking hard at Megiddo too. See Prophylaxis and his desire to be terminated around that time, and Sir Chris zoning out despite his early game heroism. The lack of direction and low energy of the thread was turning away the fun of the game. The really townie folks who got most of the credit for smashing Wheat_Grinder were kind of drifting. There was a void that needed filling, and it was the role I am more familiar with playing, which is the guy who talks to literally everyone, and analyzes everyone, and engages folks and gets them focusing on things. A town cheerleader type.
Town needed that as much as I needed it for my own sanity. I wanted to feel like I was playing a game with people, not at the same time as people. There's a difference. And although town benefited in some ways from the added energy and focus and engagement that happened, I think, after lighting a fire under my own butt and watching that revitalized interest in the game spread to others, I simply couldn't play a game that I wasn't engaged in.
I'd rather town be moralized and enthusiastic and have a clear direction in the game, even if it is more dangerous to the scums, than just allow round after round to go by with little conflict or cooperation. I think the game needed a shot of adrenaline around that time, because the length of time it took to bring down Wheat_grinder was admittedly absurd. It shouldn't be that hard to kill us. But then, townies were also really difficult to kill, so it was balanced. The time it took for this process to happen was the main problem, and it sapped people's enthusiasm.
The game had the potential to be fun. But it did mean we all needed to re-commit to it.
____________
By mid to late game, I played my role as super-townie, and specifically played outside of my usual scum meta. Effort and talking and risky play was my home, very much second nature to me, but I went into overdrive on my own volition. I needed to bring something really big to the table.
There's something very pro-town about seizing the initiative and putting in the effort even when no one is pressuring you into doing it. Scums are often very, very happy when things are going their way. Even if Megiddo was under pressure, most of the rest of us were in a very safe position and we were gaining power and looking for Garland and things were good, overall. It was under control, and town had committed a bunch of self-inflicted wounds, so many many scums would be content to skate and allow town to implode.
Systematic deep looks at each player in the game, with literally hours of real reading, post-by-post, and very real sounding analysis of every single person, would not be read in any depth or detail by most players.
No one wants to read my giant walls of text. Hands up if you're even reading what I'm saying right now.
But, other players will see that I've made them. This puts a message in your brain that I am solving the game. You may agree or disagree with my conclusions (which, neatly summarized, most folks will read) and pick at them, but I will have created a wall of thought, constructed so that no matter what you ask me, there will be a townie-sounding answer to it. It's about more than just appearances, it's beneath the surface, the unspoken depth of thought.
It was the words I wasn't typing which were more important than the words I was typing. Not to sound too far up my own ass, what I mean by that, is that it isn't enough to post a townie-looking fake analysis. What convinces people to believe you're a townie is what you do with your own work afterward.
The purpose of the exercise was to believe the lie, and literally think about the game, from a townie perspective, for many consecutive hours, to the point where the stuff that's coming out of my head now sounds identical to what I would say if I am a townie. Then, interact with everyone I can. The analyses were probably never more than glanced at. I am fully aware of that, but if they were picked at by anyone, it would reveal that I never rushed any of it. It would reveal I looked at hundreds of posts and gave a thought pattern on many of them, each of those fake thoughts having to pass every townie's sniff test.
It's easy to control the town's opinion of you if you have just a few carefully-crafted posts for them to look at, which are safe.
Harder is to make your "entire thought process" transparent, and make every thought you say you have shine like a diamond. Crafting those thoughts is painstaking work, and a lot of it will be glossed over, not read, and essentially meaningless or even dangerous if you blunder elsewhere and are caught. None of that townie-sounding stuff matters if it isn't really being paid attention to, and you cannot sound like a townie in real time.
All those big walls that took hours to construct didn't mean anything, all they contributed was a backdrop, a stage. What mattered really was the posts you would in fact read afterward, the ones where I spoke to you directly.
The other thing is that it gives townies the impression that the town leadership is solving it, and that puts less individual responsibility on them to solve it independently, and go back and do your own analysis of the scumbags that died.
If I sound really townie and I'm engaging with a ton of people and many of them sound townie, and I'm analyzing the dead scums, and several of my thoughts match yours, then you let me run with the ball. I'm saying a lot of what you're thinking, so, you have no urgent need to challenge me. You'll think that since I'm your ally, you don't need to copy my work, it's enough that I've done it. But, that takes away some of the tools you use to solve.
If you let me do the accounting for you, sooner or later, you're not going to notice that a thousand dollars has gone missing.
It looks very much like the town is decoding the game. That causes other townies to loosen their grip on the direction of the game, or to become complacent. That is the main purpose behind The Act.
The walls of words become white noise which filter into the background and are skipped over, and just accepted as town solving behavior. That concession leads to others, like the analysis of the dead scums being done by live scum instead of the town, for the most part.
The next concession is that there appears to be real, productive discussion between outspoken, active, engaged townies, which look like they will bear fruit. There's morale, energy, and direction independent of each individual townie, and that means that each townie feels slightly less like they have to take the front and center, to lead, even when they are confirmed innocent. Conceding that the townie-sounding guy is solving the game leads to an atmosphere that feels comfortable to townies.
Townies are never more dangerous than when they feel they are about to lose.
If they feel the scumbags are on the run, and the situation is well in hand, and there are a ton of super townie-sounding people in command, their sense of urgency decreases. It offsets the good morale they have, and lulls them into a false sense of security.
If you think there's a lot of live scumbags, or scumbags which are perfectly healthy, or that no one is solving the game, you tend to take personal responsibility and you tend to take action. If you feel like the inner circle or the town leadership is on the brink of a solve, that's the illusion that leads to big problems for the town when it isn't true.
Days and weeks and months pass, and the ground has shifted underneath you, and suddenly you're under fire by this same leadership, and no closer to solving. And because they look townier than you, hitting back looks scummy. If their arguments sound legit, and they also look really townie, you're on the defensive.
In mafia games, sometimes there is no defense to a correct-sounding wrong argument.
Under pressure, you look for someone else who looks scummy, because at least they could be scum. That further weakens the town because the focus becomes on you and your alternative suspect, and if both are townie, it will be a while before the focus is back where it needs to be.
The town-on-town-on-town between Prophylaxis, Jskura, and Mister Sins by the end was key. I felt for Proph, and Sins, and Jskura, as suspicions went on them in turn, because I've been there. When the town comes for you, and they're wrong, and dead-set on killing you, it is hard to generate the game winner play. And you also feel like it's your fault you're losing, because you feel like you've somehow done something wrong to come under this suspicion.
Some hold out hope that town can still win, and accept what feels inevitable, yet redouble their efforts to get their top suspect killed, like Proph did. Some might let their emotions get the better of them, and lose control of what they're saying. They might figure, since they have nothing left to personally lose, they can behave more uninhibited, and damn the consequences. Others might simply have made honest mistakes, like Mister Sins did, and explain their position and continue the solve as best they can, even though their voice is being lowered in volume and not listened to as much anymore, because of the suspicion on them.
But the game is not that fragile. The game is NOT lost just because of you, or your mislynch, or your misvote. It is a gradual thing, a series of miscues or mishaps, adding weight on the chest of the town. If the situation hadn't already gotten that bad before then, then your mislynch, or misplay, or misvote will not have had the result it did.
Never feel like you are personally responsible for the loss, just because you were in some way involved with one of town's late game misadventures.
Equally harmful to town's game are early game miscues, early game mislynches, lost opportunities before then. But those happened a long while ago, and are less sexy to think about. Yet they're just as harmful.
The game is a town victory by force if they guess correctly, but it is never -suddenly- a defeat by only one incorrect guess, or it's not a very fun or fair game, nor a very interesting one.
Concluding thoughts:
If you feel bad for being a part of a game for five months and your team lost, having been there at least a hundred times myself, having been defeated more times than I remember, know this... each village victory takes a village, and so does each village loss. These are not individual results. Village could have won this game. There was no one mistake that cost the team, it was death by a thousand cuts. And often enough, they truly did feel like papercuts, because the amount of time it took for us to seriously inflict real, permanent damage on the village was craziness. Each townie we killed took over 1 night's worth of damage to remove. Sometimes more.
Don't play the what if game. As a competitor, you will too often feel like your efforts were futile if you lose. If only you did X, you would have won, you will tell yourself. That's not the point of why we play. At least it shouldn't be and it isn't the reason why I do.
I play because I want to make friends, something I was utterly terrible at when I was young, and I have struggles with to this day.
I play because I want to talk to people, I am not good at starting conversations with strangers in real life. I'm rather quiet and a loner, the polar opposite of my mafia personality, which the safety of near-anonymity allows me to explore.
I play because I want to have fun and make jokes and see something new, and have an opportunity to figure out a mystery, or to have a chance to perform for people.
If it is a matter of wins and losses, I think my lifetime win record as a townie is near .500 or less. And I don't consider myself a bad townie, either.
And some of the most fun games I've ever played, with the most cunning strategies and incredible plays that really wow-ed people, were games as scum that I lost. I was also proud of a game where I was a townie and zero scums got lynched, but I had voted nothing but scums, and said why these folks were scum for most of the game.
The individual performance doesn't always result in a team win. Sometimes, you also get a team win when you got killed off early or didn't really contribute to it.
You should, if you're struggling with the outcomes of mafia games, stop thinking in such a results-oriented fashion. Sometimes bad play wins, sometimes it's pure luck, sometimes you catch mafia for the wrong reasons, or for no reasons, or they are gimmes. Sometimes you deserve a win that you didn't get.
It's like a pizza delivery man earning tips. Sometimes I do an excellent job, and I get no tip. Sometimes I have nights where I'm on fire, and deliver tons of pizzas in a short time frame with an excellent upbeat attitude, accurately, and I make crap for money. Other nights, I deliver to a bunch of customers who always tip, and despite the fact that we're understaffed that night, and the food is now late and cold, I still made a lot of money.
If you convince yourself that every outcome is directly related to your performance, you will go insane. It is often arbitrary, or due to factors outside of your immediate control. It's not always a game you can personally win even with flawless play. And it is NEVER a game where the loss is all on you.
Don't think in results-only terms.
Did you have fun?
Did you meet a new person?
Were you gripped by the drama of the game as it unfolded?
Did you feel invested in the outcome?
Did you learn a new tactic?
Were you inspired?
Were you challenged?
Did you feel like your limits were tested?
Did you make friends?
Did you have fun with friends you already have?
Did you gain an experience which will make you harder to defeat next time?
Do you feel like you will be a more challenging opponent than if you hadn't played this turn?
Those things will matter more to you than individual games' wins and losses. I really don't care about wins I accomplished 6 years ago. I value the memories of the fun I had much more than the win/loss record no one actually cares about anyway, other than your own record, interest in it is very thin.
Every game is a series of individual victories and defeats, and this game could have gone either way so easily.
For all the chatter about my performance because it was big and showy and impressive and had a lot of words and effort behind it, I could have easily been defeated by a small change. Just as one of many possible examples, had the townies thought forcing me to allow Bur's Enemy Skill to copy my Lure, then me blabbing that I even had Lure would have been a huge and probably game-losing mistake. Every one of us, at one point or another, probably made a mistake big enough that it could have cost us the game.
When it was suggested that we should be killing the unscanned Cythare, and I argued we needed MisterSins gone instead, that bit us in the ass later and cost us the life of my teammate Vezokpiraka. I take full responsibility for that. That was another potentially game-losing mistake I made.
Do not think my efforts this game were any more impressive than yours. Many of you crafted winning ideas, made the correct votes and calls, and could have, if the actions of everyone were in your hands, solved it yourselves. Any mistakes you made, were no more dangerous or detrimental to your own team than mine were, it only just so happened that the chips fell in such a way that, the outcome secure, I look good in retrospect. Because my good plays will be remembered and my mistakes less emphasized, because history seems to be written by the victors.
Reality is not so biased and ignorant of the facts.
This town played a very impressive game that had me sweating bullets that forced me to turn out such an effort, I felt on my back heel for most of the game, despite my performance of seeming in control of it all, I was not, I was blind to many of the dangers and nearly walked into all of them with the risks I took, and I just got lucky enough times that I'm still here to recount the tale.
And this is just my perspective, speaking for only myself as the more vocal of members of my team, but not the most important one, just an equally important one. I had an incredible team of experienced veterans working with me, who are now my friends, and there's not a damned thing I could do for them if I had died, and I made enough mistakes where I should have died in certain places. Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise. I was equally bold and foolish at times, merely fortunate to still be standing.
My teammates who died early on gave me and others on my team much-needed time to establish ourselves. My teammates who I bussed were just as important. My teammates who came up with strategies on their own, agreed or disagreed with my suggestions, made their own plans, and had to ad-lib a lot of the game on their own, and generate their own distancing movements and looking like a townie movements, they made it possible for three scums to even still be alive in that dangerous endgame, which was essentially a tie for a long time, and could have gone south so fast.
People may be especially interested in what I have to say because I'm new to this community, and theatrical, and I made a lot of words, and put in effort. People might also not be interested at all. Both are quite fine. Just don't place too much blame on yourself if you lost, and don't assign too much praise to a man who doesn't know how to shut up and might have more personal time to allocate to a game. It's a curse as often as it is a blessing, believe me.
I did feel welcomed by this community, and I feel deeply honored to be commented on so positively in the spectator chat.
I just feel that there are more positive comments to be made, and in the direction of not me. So please feel free to acknowledge your own personal victories and efforts, as well as that of others.
The game is over, so we're all on the same team again: one comprised of friends and fellow lovers of the game.
_______________________
Dedicated to Sooh, for being a beautiful friend and most loving person in my life.
We had just met online a week before this game began, and after a long and wonderful journey, we finally met in person only just recently.
I have found a lot of things I was looking for in life, from playing mafia games.
...Some things are more precious and surprising than others.
What is it that you're looking for?
I sincerely hope you all find whatever it is you're still looking for.
I agree with quite a lot of the spoilered post, in particular, and hope to see you in a game over here that more closely resembles mafia (preferably one I'm also in).
Because this, while a setup obviously crafted with hours of love and thought, wasn't really mafia. It was absent of many of the things that cause and create the dialogue and sense of community or investment to a game that mafia has - the weight of a vote, the inherent focus on behavior, on interactions that isn't as necessary when there's multitudes of mechanics to distract yourself (and others) with.
Holy ***** askthepizzaguy might be one of my favorite players in this site's history after 1 game.
Seppel is being very polite with all the our's and us's and whatnot. This is his baby, he did an overwhelming majority of the work, and I'm just glad I got to be a part of the ride.
A few thoughts:
Man, ATPG ran circles around you guys.
Why did so many people level attack instead of their abilities? Particularly the protective roles.
I forgot I did that math.
Man, Rhand and Sir Chris were generally on point. Glad I can call Rhand my (only) pupil to this day.
WHY WOULD YOU FLAVORGAME THE FIENDS. DO YOU NOT THINK WE (read: Seppel) THOUGHT OF THAT? HUNDREDS. OF. HOURS.
I forgot I had a hand in Eeveelution. I liked that game too. I wish there was a way to combat a lack of player interest, but even if we hadn't messed up the 10hp at the start, I think it may have fell to a lot of the same issues. There's not an effective way to get bodies on the floor fast enough without significant power creep.
I enjoyed Flame Warriors, but maybe that's because I let myself go in that game. Part of me feels like I just got triggered, though.
Wish I'd been more on top of the inactivity damage. Not sure it would've killed anyone any sooner than they ultimately died, though.
TIA, for now. Thanks for playing, guys. It was certainly a labor of love, and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed theorycrafting it. Glad it brought me back into the fold, as remotely as it may be.
I anticipated that Lure might have become a full and complete roleblock, but I also felt that I'd need to max out my speed before it became effective against folks like Cythare and Bur and Jskura due to their speed ratings, and so I made the command decision to ignore leveling it and focus on my HP and day attack stats, which would have been more useful in the short term. I felt those advantages were needed right then and there, even though a proper roleblock move would have been immensely powerful.
It just was too expensive. Had I began the game with Lure, as opposed to Stun Strike, you can bet your gramma's pajamas I would have maximized it and made my speed 5.
I thought about Luring Hookerpunch to stop a single revive and also prove that I had Lure, and then would have gone back to not using it until endgame.
If at any point I could have proven that Lure would have stopped those revives, and I had been deliberately not Luring Hookerpunch, I felt that might have been worth some townie points, especially since I volunteered Lure under basically no pressure. But, without investing in speed, Lure might not have been effective.
Early game I invested in hit points and assassinate, so when Lure came around it needed a lot of experience points to improve my speed and also the ability itself, it was just too expensive late game.
The need for max assassinate power almost every night of the game, the loss of a couple other mafiosi relatively early, and the value of my teammate's scan and summon and Double and throw powers made it so that investing so much in Lure would have been sinking points into stuff we didn't end up using, like Steal, and then having a Lure I didn't use because I needed to assassinate would have felt foolish.
There was also the chance it simply became lure an attack to me for less and less damage each time, as opposed to the stronger full roleblock it eventually became, and I definitely didn't need that with X Dance around.
With Rhand Wisdoming me so I could peek at level 5 Stun Strike, I knew it was a waste of time to go there. Sure, a few extra damage here and there is fine, but I anticipated that I'd be doing more assassinating than stunning or luring.
Reading the host's stuff, it appears I may still not be understanding the order of operations this game, and how speed affects it.
El Oh El.
One more Kool and the gang reference, hope I can get away with it.
I wanted to do it beforehand, but the game isn't over til the mods declare it to be so. So I decided to go with a Kool reference so I could out myself along with KK.
Although technically I deliberately outed myself by telling Bur to his face that I already knew what level 5 haste did, which I could only know if I was scum with Wheat_Grinder.
I think that bit got missed in the kerfuffle.
The foreshadowing of that moment came earlier when I encouraged Bur to improve haste to level 5 for a permanent boost. Nobody caught that either.
With 6 mafia and an SK, there was absolutely no way that the town was ever going to win this game.
For anyone who wants to complain about balancing issues, let me repeat that the town was almost assuredly going to win until Sepiriel attempted a fancy play that backfired on Day 13.
Also, if everyone in the town had targeted Bur the night he used Enemy Skill, all 3 remaining mafiates would've been caught instantly. (Even if Bur died, Hooker was alive to resurrect him.)
If you look through the spectator chat, you'll see how we thought so many times that the town was going to win... yet they just didn't make the right plays. And they weren't hard plays either.
The game was balanced so the town had the equivalent of 7 mislynches. Any more would have been insane. And that's all I'll say about that.
You see, the blood dripping off of Sepiriel's blades, that belongs to Megiddo, who might I point out didn't soak up a whole lot of vote damage this game, might be evidence in Sepiriel's favor.
But then I'm scum, so I guess I just have the perfect info. This explains much about my town-reads. I just know who the villagers are, have the entire time.
Sepiriel is confirmed town but isn't god almighty.
You do whatever you think is best to help your team. You can acquiesce to Sepiriel's request or not, and be judged for it accordingly.
I'll say this, I'm probably going to snipe the next summon I see just so I can level Lure and Speed simultaneously. So, any summon you make is liable to be shot anyway.
It's the best way to increase me as a threat and actually perform my function.
Please continue to improve haste, unless you take night damage. From the progression of what haste does, it cannot raise someone's speed by 5 at level 5, because that's not possible due to the game rules. Haste therefore must get even better at level 5 than a simple boost. Please look for me. Also, haste KamikazeArchon tonight so his Throw isn't a pile of crap. 2 possible vigilantes will be able to reduce scums HP by a lot and end this game faster. And if we're wrong on one, we still damage the other.
I encouraged Cythare and Sepiriel to vig Jskura and for Bur to haste KamikazeArchon.
By the end there, I wasn't being very subtle with my requests at all.
Pizza, I read your wall.
For anyone who wants to complain about balancing issues, let me repeat that the town was almost assuredly going to win until Sepiriel attempted a fancy play that backfired on Day 13.
Also, if everyone in the town had targeted Bur the night he used Enemy Skill, all 3 remaining mafiates would've been caught instantly. (Even if Bur died, Hooker was alive to resurrect him.)
If you look through the spectator chat, you'll see how we thought so many times that the town was going to win... yet they just didn't make the right plays. And they weren't hard plays either.
The game was balanced so the town had the equivalent of 7 mislynches. Any more would have been insane. And that's all I'll say about that.
I am admittedly biased because I am scum this game, but as a very experienced game host, the points raised here are quite valid.
If anything the mafia's numbers didn't mean a whole lot, given how town had a wide range of abilities that cleared several folks or made them visible/accountable at night, or could kill scumbags. Since only one scum could assassinate per night, and our other abilities paled in comparison to that power for almost the entire game until throw was developed and the summons were, the town was more powerful than scums were.
We could have taken out some of the more problematic powers sooner, e.g. Cythare and Hookerpunch were left alive too long, but it took us a long while to kill off a lot of other folks who needed to be rendered dead and were never going to be lynched this game.
When town has the ability to win the game even when they're at 3 versus 3, that tells you how powerful town's team was in comparison to the scum's team.
In fairness, it is much harder for them to coordinate, but some obvious avenues of advancement were left on the table, particularly with regard to quicken, summons, cure/protect on the revived townies a lot sooner, and Bur's enemy skill. And the vig hits on townies could have been on scums.
It might be harder for town to competently wield the amazing powers they have, and scum might be more deadly with fewer powers because they're coordinated, but that mismatch on one side is compensated for by the mismatch on the other side. That's why it's a playable game.
If town coordinated properly scums never win. I even suggested a blueprint for how nights should go once the mass claim happened. Who picked up the ball and said "Bur, you X, Cythare, you Y, and Jskura, you Z, while Proph, Rhand, and MisterSins do A, and Sepiriel does B, while Pizza does C"?
Those abilities would have complemented one another to a forced outing of the entire mafia team due to enemy skill alone, and I noted that in the scum chat.
And the mass claim itself could have happened many rounds sooner than it did, causing further problems for us.
Town left enough good tools in their toolbox that despite some scum miscues, we caught up to them.
There were some issues with the setup but unfairly favoring any team wasn't one of them, even Garland would have been fine with a non-botched claim. We had scanned Dante, he came back not Garland, so we moved on. He probably wins the endgame if he doesn't get outed by the mass claim, because we were in no position to deal with several weakened townies, let alone a nigh unkillable stealthy monster with dual night abilities.
W may only be paid with white mana. U may only be paid with blue mana. B may only be paid with black mana. R may only be paid with red mana. G may only be paid with green mana. C may only be paid with colorless mana. 1 may be paid with white, blue, black, red, green, or clolorless mana.
@Seppel: That's fine in theory, but in action, given the nature of the setup, everyone was going to do exactly what they felt like doing, and no one could be held accountable for it due to the abundant scummy play and misplays.
@dan: I leveled my ATK first because I assumed that Power Strike was going to be Level + ATK damage, which would mean that when it was leveled, I would be doing, at most, as much as I would be doing had I simply maxed my ATK, first - and at Night, there was the potential of Roleblocking and protection getting in the way of my damage. So I figured thay, as a Fighter, I should simply be leveling my ATK, then my Skill, my HP when possible, and eventually, my Speed.
Multi-classing into Blue Mage was a mistake, and I wished I had chosen something else once Seppel explained the Order of Operations regarding Enemy Skill to me.
I was amazed when Bur didn't push the Enemy Skill plan, Pizza (yes, I read your walls), and when nobody called you out as scum for killing the puppy, and when nobody called Arch out for being scum when his entire set of actions for the endgame consisted of, "Push weak reasoning, Double Attack townie in first post of Day, lurk until Night".
But I guess that was all more obvious from an outside perspective.
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
W may only be paid with white mana. U may only be paid with blue mana. B may only be paid with black mana. R may only be paid with red mana. G may only be paid with green mana. C may only be paid with colorless mana. 1 may be paid with white, blue, black, red, green, or clolorless mana.
I did want to say that I was very impressed with you, Pitzer, and I hope you will play a mini or something sometime because I would like to play a more traditional game with you.
That one post I made about how I wasn't paying attention to you when you said you were going to replace out and I regretted it... yeah. I was more suspicious than a strict null read then, but I knew I had nothing and I wasn't even close to sure I was right about being suspicious. So I figured, eh, I'll just hope you aren't scum and that if you are eventually something will happen or eventually the people alive will think, "wait, why is he still alive?" But that's a sign of how well you were playing, because I knew I didn't have the content to even try to start casing you, nor did I have the conviction that it was the correct angle to pursue, nor did I have the energy that I knew it'd take to stay engaged with the game enough to complete the lengthy debate that I knew something like that would pursue. So, basically, it's the only time in my mafia career that I've had a hunch that I chose not to at least explore because I thought the results would be futile. I think some of that was the lack of voting mechanic and some of it was that I was recovering from burn out/feeling burned with my Iso interchanges... but the main reason was that you were just playing so cleanly that I couldn't sell myself to do it/would have had a really hard time figuring out where to start, which I think is like the best compliment that you can pay a scum player.
Anyway. Congrats to the fiends and thanks to Seppel and Dan for the extraordinary efforts that went into this!
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
ATPG dancing through the thread with walls is exactly why I have begun to consider people scum just for posting walls. The amount of confusion he sowed was crazy.
This is the first game in a looooong time where I didn't feel constant suspicion, which allowed me to get away with a lot of BS with jumping on popular wagons.
Oh, Kamikaze, you and KoolKoal had some really good interactions with fellow scums which allowed me to argue how townie you looked.
It's really refreshing to see teammates who understand that distancing is not always bussing, sometimes it's just having interactions which appear disconnected, and subtle, less dramatic.
Despite my pressuring, questioning, and spotlighting Vezok, I was more distancing from him than bussing. Same with Megiddo.
The other thing is, when I've argued at length that someone is clear, people don't usually see that as a scum defending another scum. Any link between me and you, or me and KoolKoal, seemed to be discounted.
Sometimes the best distancing is to curl up in one another's arms and say how townie you look to me, I suppose. People are worried that links you together, but scums do that to townies and townies do that to other townies more often.
People don't typically assume it's 2 scums involved.
Well done Pizza, that was probably one of the best performances as scum that I've seen.
Seppel, I really liked the design of this game and I thought it was buckets of fun to play, even if the early game was super slow and uneventful. I just wish that I would have started with the Meditate and Strike ability or survived a bit longer to upgrade it. The level 5 version looks insane.
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"I'm a compulsive liar no matter what team I play on, but I'm trying to get better about it."
I can't believe the town let you live as long as they did.
I pretty much only get lynched when I'm a townie. Or there's a town detective. Then I always get lynched because I always get scanned because, uh.... I pretty much only ever get lynched when I'm a townie and people take note of that.
I chickened out of this game early. Sorry about that...
I have been watching it though, and more and more as the game progressed. I regretted a few times near the end here that I replaced out, but Proph, you did a much better job than I could have ever done.
I still don't think 5 month games are for me, no matter how well structured they are (because I think this was really well put together fwiw). I'm far too impatient. If you'll still have me though I'd love to play in a smaller game on this site. You have thoroughly entertained me.
I was privy to parts of the hair pulling that Pizza was doing after I replaced out, and I have to say you all had him on his toes for sure! He isn't lying when he says he was really worried at several points in the game. (So cute, so funny! )
Again, I think you all did an amazing job and stuck with it until the end, and I bow to the victors!
Yeah, the part of the scum chat where I posted at myself for like four straight hours and like 20 straight posts or whatever was an indication of my high stress levels.
This was no cakewalk. We were fighting from behind and fighting a losing battle at times, most of the time.
There was one point before we knew about X Dance where I felt we were in really decent shape, and then Vezok exploded into a pile of flaming meat, and I started to freak out a tiny bit.
Good game to the scum team. I've said multiple times that this would probably go down as one of my worst games in recent memory (next to Celestial and the other games I was playing that contributed to the trainwreck there) and it turned out to be true. I like to think that I have a decent view of the gamestate in basically all of my town games I play, and this one fell quite short of the mark.
I planned to write out a treatise about why I thought this game's design was bad, but I'll refrain from that since most of it will just be me ranting at myself. It's just, I don't know how Seppel expected us to hold up throughout the game. Days 1-3 were good because all of the townie energy was still there and we caught Wheat. However, as the Days went on, most of the townies (myself included) just checked out of the game, which allowed the scum to take advantage of the loss of pace extremely easily.
Pizza: You were a bright light in this pit of despair and you were a genuine pleasure to play with. I think the reason why I ended up townreading you at the middle/end of the game was because I wanted you to be town since you were the only one of us to not become apathetic as the game went on. Thanks for playing, and I hope we can play together in future games!
I do what I can, people needed to engage with the game and have it be fun. It's more fun when people talk to you.
One of the responsibilities of the big bad evil people is to act sort of like a DM or player-controlled enemy character in a roleplaying game, understand that you're not the hero, you're there to be the challenge, your purpose is to create an antagonist for the heroes to fight against, you're almost like a co-host of the game, without you, there really is no game and nothing for townies to hunt.
It's another reason why I generally don't lurk. Providing challenge to the town involves engaging them, provoking them, trying to mislead them, and trying to get them to engage with the game and invest in it. Regardless of role I don't like it when players get down on themselves, or one another, and if people aren't having fun, is problem.
There was a lull in activity and energy in the early midgame and that gets largely countered when you take the time to engage with every person who is playing and challenging them to think and giving them something to think about and discuss.
It took a long, long, long time to bring down the town, and it would have been an utterly joyless and honorless endeavor if all the townies just simply checked out or resigned.
I really would rather play against a town that wants to defeat me really badly and has energy and enthusiasm.
It's sort of like an NFL football game- you kind of don't want your opponents to be missing their top players or for them to be injured, or lose by penalties, or any other sort of thing.
You want your opponents to be fighting fresh, with enthusiasm, at their best, wanting to win, and feeling like they can.
Regardless of how you feel about Tom Brady or Bill Belichick, or all the nonsense with the cheating accusations, some of which might even be true, especially past accusations of that, something that is generally agreed upon is that Bill is one of the best coaches of the modern era and Tom is one of the best quarterbacks, and if you face off against the Patriots, and Tom is out due to injury that season and they're missing their best players and Bill came down with syphilis and died, well, you haven't really beaten the Patriots, you beat their second stringers. It's a win but it doesn't feel as good as actually defeating the hall of famer championship level team you expect.
I like Peyton Manning, I like Aaron Rodgers. I get excited when my team plays against them. Because who cares if you beat a team that's 2 and 10? Who cares if you beat their backup quarterback? I want to see the very best of my opponents because it makes for a more interesting and engaging contest.
No-shows, injuries, second stringers, that's not what I want. I want the top people at their best.
PS you replacement players really stepped up, like I said. Much of the core of the town's brain by late middlegame was comprised of replacement players who didn't have to invest as much in this game because they probably didn't feel like it was their own, if they replaced in late.
We don't have a game if we don't have the participation. Letting the game run its course without any fire or passion seemed like a disservice to our game hosts and our fellow players.
I always want people to get involved. I never want to see folks feeling left out or ignored or feeling like they're not being heard.
Sometimes it might be to my advantage as scum if they're ignored, but, there's more to the game than getting a win due to safe and passive moves, or because the other team lost too many players midway through the game to put up a real fight.
I didn't want to lose any of you, and I hated that we lost a couple opponents due to inactivity, especially those who looked like they never intended to be inactive. I bet you any money RelmArrowny would have been a terrifying opponent if he hadn't left the game.
That's not how I want to win, and it's not how I want townies to lose. I also didn't want Garland to die from inactivity, then it felt like we didn't really beat him, he just left.
I felt like we beat him fair and square, as square as finding a new player scum due to mass claim really is, and the damage we gave him and the arguments we used to keep the focus on him.
I never want to be spotted a free townie death, I never want to lose players due to heated insult matches between them and other players, I never want people feeling excluded, and I don't want extra information. I think at one point the game mod posted something we weren't supposed to see in our scum chat, and deleted it, but we would have gotten a copy of it in our emails. Thankfully he pointed it out and I deleted it.
Extra advantages aren't fun. I like the game to be as fun and in keeping with the host's idea of balanced and by the rulebook as possible.
That's my approach. Then it feels better when you do prevail, against the odds, or if the game was pretty balanced even. Winning games lopsidedly with extra advantages isn't glorious or dramatic at all.
On the one hand, my reads were on point.
On the other, the body wasn't willing.
A disappointing game for me. Nothing Seppel did wrong or anything.
Pizza I politely request a rematch in a normal game.
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2014 - Best Mafia Performance (Individual)(Wu Tang) 2014 - Best Mafia Newcomer 2015 - Best Town Performance (Individual) (Predator) 2015 - Best Town Performance (Group) - Predator Mafia 2015 - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - 2015 Invitational 2015 - Best Town Player 2015 - Best Mafia Player 2015 - Best Overall Player
2011: Best Mafia Performance (Individual) - Best Newcomer
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
Pizza you are one of the kindest, most humble, great mafia players I have ever seen.
Man oh man, what a dangerous guy you are. I look forward to facing you again.
Private Mod Note
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2014 - Best Mafia Performance (Individual)(Wu Tang) 2014 - Best Mafia Newcomer 2015 - Best Town Performance (Individual) (Predator) 2015 - Best Town Performance (Group) - Predator Mafia 2015 - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - 2015 Invitational 2015 - Best Town Player 2015 - Best Mafia Player 2015 - Best Overall Player
Pizza, out of curiosity, why didn't you engage me when I kept trying to talk to you?
Bad timing. Around that time of the game was when I really wanted to just quit mafia altogether.
Also, the day 1 - day 2 section of the game I was still trying to figure out how I should behave. There wasn't a whole lot that was actually happening due to the way the attacks were landing, and no lynched persons or murdered persons yet, so not much for me to comment on.
I also barely had any idea who people were and I couldn't get a handle on their personalities. I was very much in wait and see, and then, bad things happened and I wanted out. But, I got over it.
Pizza you are one of the kindest, most humble, great mafia players I have ever seen.
Man oh man, what a dangerous guy you are. I look forward to facing you again.
Remember, it doesn't count if you just lynch me every game to make sure you still get me when I'm mafia.
You have to guess I'm townie and be correct sometimes or else you haven't really figured me out yet.
Just always assume I'm townie and you'll be right more often than not, and the times you're wrong, it will be entertaining. Like a Michael Bay movie, just lots of explosions and fiery carnage, and space alien ninja zombie robots who are also pirates.
Askthepizzaguy attacks Cythare! (4897)
Cythare attacks KoolKoal, but the damage was prevented! (4900)
Kefka_NPC attacks Cythare! (4901)
FINAL_BOSS_NPC attacks Cythare! (4902)
KoolKoal attacks Cythare! (4904)
Attacks remaining:
You think I should go for Pizzaguy instead?
Draft my cube! (630 cards)
Bur, you should attack Cythare
That random number generator hated my guts. It seemed to be pointing at me, going, "hey! Hey! Maybe pizzaguy is guilty!"
Smug little RNG. Never could persuade it I was innocent.
Ah, this feels so good...
jskura attacks KoolKoal, but the damage was prevented! (4896)
Askthepizzaguy attacks Cythare! (4897)
Cythare attacks KoolKoal, but the damage was prevented! (4900)
Kefka_NPC attacks Cythare! (4901)
FINAL_BOSS_NPC attacks Cythare! (4902)
KoolKoal attacks Cythare! (4904)
KamikazeArchon attacks Cythare! (4908)
Bur attacks Askthepizzaguy! (4911)
Over the course of the next night cycles, the fiends destroy the remaining two heroes.
Bur has died. He was a level 18 Time Mage Blue Mage
jskura has died. He was a level 23 Thief Black Mage
The remaining fiends celebrate their victory.
Askthepizzaguy, the level 26 Fighter Ninja Fiend has survived with 34 HP.
KamikazeArchon, the level 24 Thief Ninja Fiend has survived with 74 HP.
KoolKoal, the level 24 Black Mage Fiend has survived with 19 HP.
Kefka_NPC, the level 4 monster disappears into the ether.
FINAL_BOSS_NPC, the level 5 monster disappears into the ether.
Congratulations to KoolKoal, Askthepizzaguy, KamikazeArchon, Megiddo, Vezokpiraka (r. Hunger, r. Gentleman Johnny), and Wheat_Grinder for a mafia victory!
Full setup details and chats available soon!
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Thank you all for playing! This game was very close, up until night 13. In the words of Megiddo:
"Ok after looking at this I put scum winning at like... 20% right now. We need to get very lucky to win."
...then after Sepiriel's misvig of MisterSins instead of KoolKoal: "well chances of scum victory just literally doubled."
Town MVPs
Sepiriel -- The early calling of Wheat set the town on the right track.
Cythare -- Picked up where Sepiriel left off, hunting down the mafia wherever they hid!
HookerPunch -- For literally giving the town a second chance at life. We never expected that the mafia would let this role revive nine players.
Bur -- For really diving into the mechanics of the game and asking me so many questions!
Mafia MVPs
Askthepizzaguy -- After spending 5 game days needing to be replaced, we couldn't find enough replacements, and he stuck through to the end. He broke the lid on many of the game mechanics, predicted people's actions like a hawk, and convinced nearly everyone that he was town to the bitter end.
KamikazeArchon -- ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Don't receive any votes for 14 game days straight.
KoolKoal -- For the best "lurking in plain sight" performance.
Honorable Mention
DanteRossetti -- a complete newbie to the site, got randomed into the hardest role of the game, and took the bull by the horns. Survived a long time!
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What's next?
Designing this game was tough, and it took years of on-and-off thinking between me and Dan. There were so many things we learned from Final Fantasy 1 Mafia and Eeveeloution Mafia. At some point, I felt that incorporating all of our lessons learned was impossible, but Dan saved the day, giving me a lot of math to show what needed to be balanced for everything to work.
Our one biggest mistake was that we accidentally gave everyone 10 extra HP at the beginning of the game. For the early game slog, we apologize!
I'm not going to do another HP-based game. I've probably spent about 200 hours modding this game, and that's a LOT. There's definitely room for improvement to the fine-tuning of a HP-based game, but I think we've reached the limit of what can be done with HP-based games as a general concept. We've learned from our mistakes, and created something that is swingy but balanced. And that leaves me satisfied, regardless of which team wins.
Near the end of this game, I started designing a much simpler "class-focused" leveling system for a Mafia game. No HP, no attack power -- just a straight-up voting system (with one potential modification). If something comes of it, I'll let you know!
I have no gripes past what I've already said. Thanks for playing with me, everybody!
Visual Guide to everyone's stats for every Day/Night in the game.
Mafia QT
Spectator QT
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All special moves
Fighter Moves
Ninja Moves
Thief Moves
Dancer Moves
White Mage Moves
Black Mage Moves
Blue Mage Moves
Time Mage Moves
Fiend Moves
Finally, Garland has some special rules of his own:
* He can't gain HP
* He gains 2 levels per night
* He may use an extra move each night
* As a being of chaos, if a player uses a special move to learn Garland's class or any stats or skills, they won't learn the truth. At any time, Garland may PM the mod with what he wants an investigation to return. If he doesn't choose anything, it will be randomized (the stats will match his level/2).
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The design process
Regarding the fact that the time limit for game days is much shorter than a regular game: Running through scenarios in our head, we quickly figured out that, because players start off weak in the early game, player interest would suffer. We had two choices: Increase everyone's power across the board, or speed up the day/night phases. Increasing everyone's power across the board practically ruins the elegance of the levelling-up system, which aids in not punishing early-game mistakes for either team. So we decided to make game days go fast: one RL day per living player. It encourages players to actively use their vote power and remain engaged in the game. Plus, the night abilities make up for weaker attacks during the day.
Regarding HP balancing: Most classes start at 2 attack power. Originally we had everyone start at 1 attack power but realized that the power increase from 1 to 2 is way too significant. So we bumped almost everyone up to 2 attack power, and doubled everyone's HP to make up for it. (SEPPELNOTE: Yet somehow we accidentally added +10 HP on top of that...)
Regarding the risk of the Blue Mage with Level X Dance levelling his skill up: It's a risk/reward factor. He may just want to stop at the level 3 roleblock, or risk it all and go for the level 5 doom. Players will be claiming, and everyone levels up once per night anyway, so a Level 5 Doom is going to hit a player eventually. It's also handy for catching players in lies. Side note: Level X Dance was inspired from FF6 with Level 3 Muddle, Level 4 Pearl, and Level 5 Doom.
Regarding the Summoner: Aside from the level 5 summon which protects the black mage, none of that seems like a problem. It might be a little more balanced if the Level 5 summon acted like a bodyguard instead of a doc, but I really think the town needs all the help it can get. In an RPG Mafia Game, killing the smartest players first is an even higher priority than normal, since everyone is a mini-vig, at the very least, leaving less room for investigative roles to be useful.
Regarding town optimization: The town is always going to play sub-optimally. However, they have a lot of non-damage night abilities that hopefully will make up for that.
Regarding the Mafia choosing what abilities to level up: It would probably be optimal to have two Mafiates level Assassinate just in case one of them goes down. The Mafia has a lot of options when it comes to building, and it's up to them to determine their best skillset.
Regarding the fact that this is a 24-player setup that was developed before the change to reel full games back to ~18 players and as such, the game might get hard to track, even with two mods: The mechanics aren't that hard to keep straight (day is basic attacks, and night is resolved all at once).
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The math that Dan lovingly crafted
Usefulness of each class, based on maximum damage output and damage-to-SP ratio.
Thief w/Double (either)
* Atk to 5
* Double to 5
== 9 damage for 7 SP
1.3
Black Mage w/Poison
* Poison to 5
* Atk to 5
== 10 - 24 damage for 7 SP
1.4 - 3.4
Fighter w/Stun Strike
* Atk to 5
* Stun Strike to 5
== 9 damage for 6 SP
1.5
Ninja w/Lure
Thief w/out Double
Dancer w/Lament + Rally
White Mage, any
Blue Mage, any
Time Mage, any
* Atk to 5
== 5 damage for 3 SP
1.6
Black Mage w/Meteor
* Meteor to 5
* Atk to 5
== 14 damage for 7 SP
2.0
Fighter w/Double Cleave:
* Atk to 5
* Double Cleave to 5
== 15 damage for 7 SP
2.1
Black Mage w/Summon
* Summon to 5
* Atk to 5
== 15 damage for 7 SP
2.1
Fighter w/Power Slash
* Power Slash to 5
* Atk to 5
== 13 damage for 6 SP
2.2
Ninja w/Meditate and Strike
* M&S to 5
* Hoard SP
== 17 damage for 7 SP (102 damage for 24 SP)
2.4 - 4.3
Ninja w/Throw
* Throw to 5
* Spd to 5
* Atk to 5
== 25 damage for 10 SP
2.5
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How we balanced the mafia kill vs the town power:
(This section assumes some old setup data, like Assassinate dealing 10/20/30/40/50 damage with no recoil)
Most commonly, a class tops-out its damage ability at 7 SP (which is attainable no later than Day 9/Night 9). The first FF mafia ended on Day 6, so while this game's Day/Night cycle is less powerful but faster, we can call these numbers theoretical maximums, at 7 SP.
We have three distinct tiers: 5 damage, 9 damage, and ~15 damage.
There are 18 available slots (50%) in the 5 damage tier.
There are 4 available slots (11%) in the 9 damage tier.
There are 14 available slots (39%) in the ~15 damage tier.
This averages out to approximately 9 damage. With an average starting HP of 40, this equates to 5 "votes" to kill (assuming someone uses their vote and night ability (if relevant) to deal damage to the same player). This makes using 1 SP for a +10 HP increase make sense as "I need 1 more vote to be killed." This is good for scum, not so good for townies who can be killed right away with Assassinate -- iLord and Guardman were right to make the mafia nightkill deal damage to a mafiate, so I want to add "Deal 5 damage to yourself." to the end of each level of Assassinate. This balances out the need for extra HP to "less important than everything else" for both teams (irrelevant for Garland).
In other words, players start off underpowered, but end up balanced in the endgame.
Downside: The first day/night cycle will likely not have a dead body.
Fix: We make the time limit for D1 shorter than regular D1 to keep players interested.
e.g. Day 1 will last only 2 weeks. Every game Day after that will have a time limit of 24 hours * # of living players.
I think the only thing we need to watch out for when randomizing the roles is to evenly distribute the heavy-hitting roles and the weak-hitting roles across the teams.
Side-note: I'm reducing the level requirement to gain a dual-class to 10 because 20 is absolutely unlikely, but 10 may come around.
With that out of the way, I think the only thing left is balancing the mafia nightkill. Assuming the mafia's possible maximum power:
1 Fiend = Likely to carry out the nightkill. 55 max damage.
1 Fighter Fiend = 15 Max Damage
1 Thief Fiend = 9 Max Damage
1 White Mage Fiend = 5 Max Damage
1 Black Mage Fiend = 14 Max Damage
1 Time Mage Fiend = 5 Max Damage
That's 103 damage possible by Day 9.
Garland's max is 24 damage.
Now let's calculate the town's power:
9 possible @ ~15 Max Damage
1 possible @ 9 Max Damage
7 possible @ 5 Max Damage
That's 179 damage possible by Day 9.
This puts the anti-town power at 127 versus the town power at 179.
At full power, the town forces can kill 4.5 players per day/night. The anti-town forces could potentially kill off 3 townies per day/night cycle, which reduces the town power by ~1.25 kills.
In other words, one full day/night of the town attacking scum means the town is very likely going to lose.
Note that even if a mafiate kills himself from use of Assassinate, there will always be another to take his place as the Assassinator, meaning the Mafia's minimum max damage is still 55, and could easily kill two townies in a three-way.
What if we lowered the mafia nightkill damage to 10/15/20/25/30 (and reducing the recoil to 1/2/3/4/5 damage to self)? That reduces the anti-town max potential to 83 damage per day/night, or about 2 kills per day/night.
That gives the town approximately two full days of full-power screwups before they are close to auto-losing. That feels a lot more fair.
These changes feel closer to the whole "three mislynches before losing" concept.
=======================================================================================
And that's all.
Seppel's final though: Hooray, we didn't go longer than Inheritance or Flame Warriors!
I am so sorry to everyone for blowing up the way I did early-game. I was stupidly pressed for time and absolutely loathe repeating myself, and the game, itself, was a horrible slog, as Megiddo already stated. I re-read part of the game and wanted to not ever do anything like that ever again.
With 7 mafia and an SK, there was absolutely no way that the town was ever going to win this game. Sorry, Seppel, but I don't think you gave us nearly enough margin for error. That said, I appreciate all of the effort that went into this game, so thank you for putting all of the hard work into it that you did!
Special thanks to Pizza for sticking through the whole game with boatloads of effort, and for even coming to MTGS to play with us, to begin with. I hope you return for more games that are actually played like Mafia - this was obviously an exception to that.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
This thread has 99 pages and it's been a lot of fun.
The 3 remaining scum really deserved this victory.
It was hard to not trust Pizza with all the effort he put in. I managed to scumread him a few times, but went back on it every time. I learned that gut > brains when reading him.
KoolKoal put in just enough effort. He would've been poe'd eventually, but he did well staying quiet when town was eating itself.
Kami did a great job staying under the radar too.
I wonder if things would've gone any differently if I wasn't on full vl/a when I got raised. I knew KK or Pizza had to be responsible for that Chris-killing summon. But I think by then it was already too late.
Doesn't really matter.
Rhand, you along with Sir Chris (etc, not trying to overlook anyone...) were townies with not-really-fearsome action abilities that were fearsome just because of the incredible bull***** sensors you have installed in your brains. I needed you dead because you'd defeat us with thinking and speaking alone. Not the damage you inflict with your vote, or the actions you do at night, just the fact that you were solving independently and often correctly.
You were among the town's finest. I was never more worried about resurrected townies winning the game against us than when Sir Chris resurrected and when you were resurrected.
What you brought to the game might not have been your personal best game of all time, but- I think the scum quicktopic highlights how much I personally feared for my life when you really began to engage mid-to-late game, and I'm almost certain if we hadn't killed you when we did (both times) you'd have solved it decisively for town. I needed you silenced for scum to win, and keep in mind the other townies with crazy powerful abilities that I neglected in order to kill you dead.
Really enjoyed playing with you (and so many others) because you were an intensely challenging opponent.
Background of this game:
I was invited/pestered by Thingyman to join that mafia championships thing, and that's where I met Iso.
I mislynched Iso on the first round of the championships based on an idea that the guy he was attacking wasn't scum, and he was being unreasonable about pushing that case on someone I had decided was townie. Yeah, well, since Iso was also innocent, I didn't exactly do any better on that round. I also felt bad because my fingerprints were all over that lynch and the alternative that it ended up being was one of the scumbags. And personally I felt bad because Iso clearly has passion for the game and I helped kill him off and it wasn't a typical game, it was a tournament. He didn't get the same chance the rest of us did to redeem himself. I own up to my mistakes. Any choices I make which have bad consequences are always my fault.
After the game, I wanted to shake his hand and apologize to him personally and his entire forum for removing their champion. I hoped that I would make it up to you fine folks and especially him by playing in another game with him as a way of showing respect and making amends.
I did not anticipate what in the blue hell I was signing up for.
Much, much more rambling thoughts:
So, after I discussed a little and made an attack and some short interactions, and declared my intention to speed things along to the first flip, where I could begin analysis, which is my bread and butter, the day continued for like 2 weeks.
I began to zone out, and also, I began to feel like I truly was a fish out of water. I don't know how to play unless my vote has some weight and once placed, it's done. So I had no vote and felt like I had little influence on things. I might have been scum but I didn't know my teammates that well yet and they didn't know me and we hadn't really spoken much yet. So I did what I almost never do, and I played the waiting game.
Then, an event occurred offsite that made me really want to quit. Not only had Sooh (Mojito_Fun) quit the game because she definitely could not play a game with phases this long, who was my one truly familiar face, but I had been modkilled during a game I worked really really hard on under circumstances I am convinced to this day were unfair (my possibly biased opinion and I don't wish to debate it).
I asked the mod to replace me, for real, and I was dead serious. This was not a gambit or a bluff, I don't metagame the game in that manner, because it is cowardly. I really did request to replace out, and had Seppel the replacement players right then and there, I'd have been replaced out and you all would probably not have seen me again.
But no replacements were forthcoming for a while. And I do not abandon my teammates, town or mafia. So while I declared my replace out I continued to vote and provide minimal input on the game so the team I was on would not suffer for my own lack of desire to play any mafia game. There were a number of others who needed replacement on the town side, and at least one on the scum side, and since my reasons for replacing out were me being emo and whiny and not in the mood to play, as opposed to others who might have had emergencies or RL situations, I felt like the best thing I could do here was tough it out for my team and also the game host, who worked hard to assemble this game and run it.
Against my strong desire to leave, I noticed that my team was under a lot of pressure at one point, and that I wasn't, and that I had been able to get read by the majority of the people as a townie. So, I thought, I might actually be one of my team's "Deep" wolves.
If I'm critical to my team's eventual success, one of the harder scumbags to find, even though I hadn't done much yet, it's all that much more imperative that despite how I was feeling, and despite the unfamiliar landscape, I reach down deep and try hard. I challenged myself to gut it out for my team, and for the game itself.
But, one thing had to change:
I absolutely could not show up in the thread, and speak to no one in a real time manner, and leave, and feel like I was part of a community.
I began demanding of myself, and of everyone who visited this thread, that we begin a real dialogue, and make an effort to show up in the thread and STAY in the thread for a while and speak in real time to the folks who were there.
That element was lacking particularly during the hours I tended to log on. Some had done so, especially during other times of the day, but it was often a large collection of folks posting and then leaving and the back-and-forth was limited.
It was even hurting town's morale, even though they were kicking ass finding a scum right away and others were looking hard at Megiddo too. See Prophylaxis and his desire to be terminated around that time, and Sir Chris zoning out despite his early game heroism. The lack of direction and low energy of the thread was turning away the fun of the game. The really townie folks who got most of the credit for smashing Wheat_Grinder were kind of drifting. There was a void that needed filling, and it was the role I am more familiar with playing, which is the guy who talks to literally everyone, and analyzes everyone, and engages folks and gets them focusing on things. A town cheerleader type.
Town needed that as much as I needed it for my own sanity. I wanted to feel like I was playing a game with people, not at the same time as people. There's a difference. And although town benefited in some ways from the added energy and focus and engagement that happened, I think, after lighting a fire under my own butt and watching that revitalized interest in the game spread to others, I simply couldn't play a game that I wasn't engaged in.
I'd rather town be moralized and enthusiastic and have a clear direction in the game, even if it is more dangerous to the scums, than just allow round after round to go by with little conflict or cooperation. I think the game needed a shot of adrenaline around that time, because the length of time it took to bring down Wheat_grinder was admittedly absurd. It shouldn't be that hard to kill us. But then, townies were also really difficult to kill, so it was balanced. The time it took for this process to happen was the main problem, and it sapped people's enthusiasm.
The game had the potential to be fun. But it did mean we all needed to re-commit to it.
By mid to late game, I played my role as super-townie, and specifically played outside of my usual scum meta. Effort and talking and risky play was my home, very much second nature to me, but I went into overdrive on my own volition. I needed to bring something really big to the table.
There's something very pro-town about seizing the initiative and putting in the effort even when no one is pressuring you into doing it. Scums are often very, very happy when things are going their way. Even if Megiddo was under pressure, most of the rest of us were in a very safe position and we were gaining power and looking for Garland and things were good, overall. It was under control, and town had committed a bunch of self-inflicted wounds, so many many scums would be content to skate and allow town to implode.
Systematic deep looks at each player in the game, with literally hours of real reading, post-by-post, and very real sounding analysis of every single person, would not be read in any depth or detail by most players.
No one wants to read my giant walls of text. Hands up if you're even reading what I'm saying right now.
But, other players will see that I've made them. This puts a message in your brain that I am solving the game. You may agree or disagree with my conclusions (which, neatly summarized, most folks will read) and pick at them, but I will have created a wall of thought, constructed so that no matter what you ask me, there will be a townie-sounding answer to it. It's about more than just appearances, it's beneath the surface, the unspoken depth of thought.
It was the words I wasn't typing which were more important than the words I was typing. Not to sound too far up my own ass, what I mean by that, is that it isn't enough to post a townie-looking fake analysis. What convinces people to believe you're a townie is what you do with your own work afterward.
The purpose of the exercise was to believe the lie, and literally think about the game, from a townie perspective, for many consecutive hours, to the point where the stuff that's coming out of my head now sounds identical to what I would say if I am a townie. Then, interact with everyone I can. The analyses were probably never more than glanced at. I am fully aware of that, but if they were picked at by anyone, it would reveal that I never rushed any of it. It would reveal I looked at hundreds of posts and gave a thought pattern on many of them, each of those fake thoughts having to pass every townie's sniff test.
It's easy to control the town's opinion of you if you have just a few carefully-crafted posts for them to look at, which are safe.
Harder is to make your "entire thought process" transparent, and make every thought you say you have shine like a diamond. Crafting those thoughts is painstaking work, and a lot of it will be glossed over, not read, and essentially meaningless or even dangerous if you blunder elsewhere and are caught. None of that townie-sounding stuff matters if it isn't really being paid attention to, and you cannot sound like a townie in real time.
All those big walls that took hours to construct didn't mean anything, all they contributed was a backdrop, a stage. What mattered really was the posts you would in fact read afterward, the ones where I spoke to you directly.
The other thing is that it gives townies the impression that the town leadership is solving it, and that puts less individual responsibility on them to solve it independently, and go back and do your own analysis of the scumbags that died.
If I sound really townie and I'm engaging with a ton of people and many of them sound townie, and I'm analyzing the dead scums, and several of my thoughts match yours, then you let me run with the ball. I'm saying a lot of what you're thinking, so, you have no urgent need to challenge me. You'll think that since I'm your ally, you don't need to copy my work, it's enough that I've done it. But, that takes away some of the tools you use to solve.
If you let me do the accounting for you, sooner or later, you're not going to notice that a thousand dollars has gone missing.
It looks very much like the town is decoding the game. That causes other townies to loosen their grip on the direction of the game, or to become complacent. That is the main purpose behind The Act.
The walls of words become white noise which filter into the background and are skipped over, and just accepted as town solving behavior. That concession leads to others, like the analysis of the dead scums being done by live scum instead of the town, for the most part.
The next concession is that there appears to be real, productive discussion between outspoken, active, engaged townies, which look like they will bear fruit. There's morale, energy, and direction independent of each individual townie, and that means that each townie feels slightly less like they have to take the front and center, to lead, even when they are confirmed innocent. Conceding that the townie-sounding guy is solving the game leads to an atmosphere that feels comfortable to townies.
If they feel the scumbags are on the run, and the situation is well in hand, and there are a ton of super townie-sounding people in command, their sense of urgency decreases. It offsets the good morale they have, and lulls them into a false sense of security.
If you think there's a lot of live scumbags, or scumbags which are perfectly healthy, or that no one is solving the game, you tend to take personal responsibility and you tend to take action. If you feel like the inner circle or the town leadership is on the brink of a solve, that's the illusion that leads to big problems for the town when it isn't true.
Days and weeks and months pass, and the ground has shifted underneath you, and suddenly you're under fire by this same leadership, and no closer to solving. And because they look townier than you, hitting back looks scummy. If their arguments sound legit, and they also look really townie, you're on the defensive.
In mafia games, sometimes there is no defense to a correct-sounding wrong argument.
Under pressure, you look for someone else who looks scummy, because at least they could be scum. That further weakens the town because the focus becomes on you and your alternative suspect, and if both are townie, it will be a while before the focus is back where it needs to be.
The town-on-town-on-town between Prophylaxis, Jskura, and Mister Sins by the end was key. I felt for Proph, and Sins, and Jskura, as suspicions went on them in turn, because I've been there. When the town comes for you, and they're wrong, and dead-set on killing you, it is hard to generate the game winner play. And you also feel like it's your fault you're losing, because you feel like you've somehow done something wrong to come under this suspicion.
Some hold out hope that town can still win, and accept what feels inevitable, yet redouble their efforts to get their top suspect killed, like Proph did. Some might let their emotions get the better of them, and lose control of what they're saying. They might figure, since they have nothing left to personally lose, they can behave more uninhibited, and damn the consequences. Others might simply have made honest mistakes, like Mister Sins did, and explain their position and continue the solve as best they can, even though their voice is being lowered in volume and not listened to as much anymore, because of the suspicion on them.
But the game is not that fragile. The game is NOT lost just because of you, or your mislynch, or your misvote. It is a gradual thing, a series of miscues or mishaps, adding weight on the chest of the town. If the situation hadn't already gotten that bad before then, then your mislynch, or misplay, or misvote will not have had the result it did.
Never feel like you are personally responsible for the loss, just because you were in some way involved with one of town's late game misadventures.
Equally harmful to town's game are early game miscues, early game mislynches, lost opportunities before then. But those happened a long while ago, and are less sexy to think about. Yet they're just as harmful.
The game is a town victory by force if they guess correctly, but it is never -suddenly- a defeat by only one incorrect guess, or it's not a very fun or fair game, nor a very interesting one.
Concluding thoughts:
If you feel bad for being a part of a game for five months and your team lost, having been there at least a hundred times myself, having been defeated more times than I remember, know this... each village victory takes a village, and so does each village loss. These are not individual results. Village could have won this game. There was no one mistake that cost the team, it was death by a thousand cuts. And often enough, they truly did feel like papercuts, because the amount of time it took for us to seriously inflict real, permanent damage on the village was craziness. Each townie we killed took over 1 night's worth of damage to remove. Sometimes more.
Don't play the what if game. As a competitor, you will too often feel like your efforts were futile if you lose. If only you did X, you would have won, you will tell yourself. That's not the point of why we play. At least it shouldn't be and it isn't the reason why I do.
I play because I want to make friends, something I was utterly terrible at when I was young, and I have struggles with to this day.
I play because I want to talk to people, I am not good at starting conversations with strangers in real life. I'm rather quiet and a loner, the polar opposite of my mafia personality, which the safety of near-anonymity allows me to explore.
I play because I want to have fun and make jokes and see something new, and have an opportunity to figure out a mystery, or to have a chance to perform for people.
If it is a matter of wins and losses, I think my lifetime win record as a townie is near .500 or less. And I don't consider myself a bad townie, either.
And some of the most fun games I've ever played, with the most cunning strategies and incredible plays that really wow-ed people, were games as scum that I lost. I was also proud of a game where I was a townie and zero scums got lynched, but I had voted nothing but scums, and said why these folks were scum for most of the game.
The individual performance doesn't always result in a team win. Sometimes, you also get a team win when you got killed off early or didn't really contribute to it.
You should, if you're struggling with the outcomes of mafia games, stop thinking in such a results-oriented fashion. Sometimes bad play wins, sometimes it's pure luck, sometimes you catch mafia for the wrong reasons, or for no reasons, or they are gimmes. Sometimes you deserve a win that you didn't get.
It's like a pizza delivery man earning tips. Sometimes I do an excellent job, and I get no tip. Sometimes I have nights where I'm on fire, and deliver tons of pizzas in a short time frame with an excellent upbeat attitude, accurately, and I make crap for money. Other nights, I deliver to a bunch of customers who always tip, and despite the fact that we're understaffed that night, and the food is now late and cold, I still made a lot of money.
If you convince yourself that every outcome is directly related to your performance, you will go insane. It is often arbitrary, or due to factors outside of your immediate control. It's not always a game you can personally win even with flawless play. And it is NEVER a game where the loss is all on you.
Don't think in results-only terms.
Those things will matter more to you than individual games' wins and losses. I really don't care about wins I accomplished 6 years ago. I value the memories of the fun I had much more than the win/loss record no one actually cares about anyway, other than your own record, interest in it is very thin.
Every game is a series of individual victories and defeats, and this game could have gone either way so easily.
For all the chatter about my performance because it was big and showy and impressive and had a lot of words and effort behind it, I could have easily been defeated by a small change. Just as one of many possible examples, had the townies thought forcing me to allow Bur's Enemy Skill to copy my Lure, then me blabbing that I even had Lure would have been a huge and probably game-losing mistake. Every one of us, at one point or another, probably made a mistake big enough that it could have cost us the game.
When it was suggested that we should be killing the unscanned Cythare, and I argued we needed MisterSins gone instead, that bit us in the ass later and cost us the life of my teammate Vezokpiraka. I take full responsibility for that. That was another potentially game-losing mistake I made.
Do not think my efforts this game were any more impressive than yours. Many of you crafted winning ideas, made the correct votes and calls, and could have, if the actions of everyone were in your hands, solved it yourselves. Any mistakes you made, were no more dangerous or detrimental to your own team than mine were, it only just so happened that the chips fell in such a way that, the outcome secure, I look good in retrospect. Because my good plays will be remembered and my mistakes less emphasized, because history seems to be written by the victors.
Reality is not so biased and ignorant of the facts.
This town played a very impressive game that had me sweating bullets that forced me to turn out such an effort, I felt on my back heel for most of the game, despite my performance of seeming in control of it all, I was not, I was blind to many of the dangers and nearly walked into all of them with the risks I took, and I just got lucky enough times that I'm still here to recount the tale.
And this is just my perspective, speaking for only myself as the more vocal of members of my team, but not the most important one, just an equally important one. I had an incredible team of experienced veterans working with me, who are now my friends, and there's not a damned thing I could do for them if I had died, and I made enough mistakes where I should have died in certain places. Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise. I was equally bold and foolish at times, merely fortunate to still be standing.
My teammates who died early on gave me and others on my team much-needed time to establish ourselves. My teammates who I bussed were just as important. My teammates who came up with strategies on their own, agreed or disagreed with my suggestions, made their own plans, and had to ad-lib a lot of the game on their own, and generate their own distancing movements and looking like a townie movements, they made it possible for three scums to even still be alive in that dangerous endgame, which was essentially a tie for a long time, and could have gone south so fast.
People may be especially interested in what I have to say because I'm new to this community, and theatrical, and I made a lot of words, and put in effort. People might also not be interested at all. Both are quite fine. Just don't place too much blame on yourself if you lost, and don't assign too much praise to a man who doesn't know how to shut up and might have more personal time to allocate to a game. It's a curse as often as it is a blessing, believe me.
I did feel welcomed by this community, and I feel deeply honored to be commented on so positively in the spectator chat.
I just feel that there are more positive comments to be made, and in the direction of not me. So please feel free to acknowledge your own personal victories and efforts, as well as that of others.
The game is over, so we're all on the same team again: one comprised of friends and fellow lovers of the game.
We had just met online a week before this game began, and after a long and wonderful journey, we finally met in person only just recently.
I have found a lot of things I was looking for in life, from playing mafia games.
...Some things are more precious and surprising than others.
What is it that you're looking for?
I sincerely hope you all find whatever it is you're still looking for.
I agree with quite a lot of the spoilered post, in particular, and hope to see you in a game over here that more closely resembles mafia (preferably one I'm also in).
Because this, while a setup obviously crafted with hours of love and thought, wasn't really mafia. It was absent of many of the things that cause and create the dialogue and sense of community or investment to a game that mafia has - the weight of a vote, the inherent focus on behavior, on interactions that isn't as necessary when there's multitudes of mechanics to distract yourself (and others) with.
Seppel is being very polite with all the our's and us's and whatnot. This is his baby, he did an overwhelming majority of the work, and I'm just glad I got to be a part of the ride.
A few thoughts:
Man, ATPG ran circles around you guys.
Why did so many people level attack instead of their abilities? Particularly the protective roles.
I forgot I did that math.
Man, Rhand and Sir Chris were generally on point. Glad I can call Rhand my (only) pupil to this day.
WHY WOULD YOU FLAVORGAME THE FIENDS. DO YOU NOT THINK WE (read: Seppel) THOUGHT OF THAT? HUNDREDS. OF. HOURS.
I forgot I had a hand in Eeveelution. I liked that game too. I wish there was a way to combat a lack of player interest, but even if we hadn't messed up the 10hp at the start, I think it may have fell to a lot of the same issues. There's not an effective way to get bodies on the floor fast enough without significant power creep.
I enjoyed Flame Warriors, but maybe that's because I let myself go in that game. Part of me feels like I just got triggered, though.
Wish I'd been more on top of the inactivity damage. Not sure it would've killed anyone any sooner than they ultimately died, though.
TIA, for now. Thanks for playing, guys. It was certainly a labor of love, and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed theorycrafting it. Glad it brought me back into the fold, as remotely as it may be.
I anticipated that Lure might have become a full and complete roleblock, but I also felt that I'd need to max out my speed before it became effective against folks like Cythare and Bur and Jskura due to their speed ratings, and so I made the command decision to ignore leveling it and focus on my HP and day attack stats, which would have been more useful in the short term. I felt those advantages were needed right then and there, even though a proper roleblock move would have been immensely powerful.
It just was too expensive. Had I began the game with Lure, as opposed to Stun Strike, you can bet your gramma's pajamas I would have maximized it and made my speed 5.
I thought about Luring Hookerpunch to stop a single revive and also prove that I had Lure, and then would have gone back to not using it until endgame.
If at any point I could have proven that Lure would have stopped those revives, and I had been deliberately not Luring Hookerpunch, I felt that might have been worth some townie points, especially since I volunteered Lure under basically no pressure. But, without investing in speed, Lure might not have been effective.
Early game I invested in hit points and assassinate, so when Lure came around it needed a lot of experience points to improve my speed and also the ability itself, it was just too expensive late game.
The need for max assassinate power almost every night of the game, the loss of a couple other mafiosi relatively early, and the value of my teammate's scan and summon and Double and throw powers made it so that investing so much in Lure would have been sinking points into stuff we didn't end up using, like Steal, and then having a Lure I didn't use because I needed to assassinate would have felt foolish.
There was also the chance it simply became lure an attack to me for less and less damage each time, as opposed to the stronger full roleblock it eventually became, and I definitely didn't need that with X Dance around.
With Rhand Wisdoming me so I could peek at level 5 Stun Strike, I knew it was a waste of time to go there. Sure, a few extra damage here and there is fine, but I anticipated that I'd be doing more assassinating than stunning or luring.
El Oh El.
One more Kool and the gang reference, hope I can get away with it.
I wanted to do it beforehand, but the game isn't over til the mods declare it to be so. So I decided to go with a Kool reference so I could out myself along with KK.
Although technically I deliberately outed myself by telling Bur to his face that I already knew what level 5 haste did, which I could only know if I was scum with Wheat_Grinder.
I think that bit got missed in the kerfuffle.
The foreshadowing of that moment came earlier when I encouraged Bur to improve haste to level 5 for a permanent boost. Nobody caught that either.
For anyone who wants to complain about balancing issues, let me repeat that the town was almost assuredly going to win until Sepiriel attempted a fancy play that backfired on Day 13.
Also, if everyone in the town had targeted Bur the night he used Enemy Skill, all 3 remaining mafiates would've been caught instantly. (Even if Bur died, Hooker was alive to resurrect him.)
If you look through the spectator chat, you'll see how we thought so many times that the town was going to win... yet they just didn't make the right plays. And they weren't hard plays either.
The game was balanced so the town had the equivalent of 7 mislynches. Any more would have been insane. And that's all I'll say about that.
I claim to be scum a lot when I'm scum, apparently.
By the end there, I wasn't being very subtle with my requests at all.
-Y.R.S.
If anything the mafia's numbers didn't mean a whole lot, given how town had a wide range of abilities that cleared several folks or made them visible/accountable at night, or could kill scumbags. Since only one scum could assassinate per night, and our other abilities paled in comparison to that power for almost the entire game until throw was developed and the summons were, the town was more powerful than scums were.
We could have taken out some of the more problematic powers sooner, e.g. Cythare and Hookerpunch were left alive too long, but it took us a long while to kill off a lot of other folks who needed to be rendered dead and were never going to be lynched this game.
When town has the ability to win the game even when they're at 3 versus 3, that tells you how powerful town's team was in comparison to the scum's team.
In fairness, it is much harder for them to coordinate, but some obvious avenues of advancement were left on the table, particularly with regard to quicken, summons, cure/protect on the revived townies a lot sooner, and Bur's enemy skill. And the vig hits on townies could have been on scums.
It might be harder for town to competently wield the amazing powers they have, and scum might be more deadly with fewer powers because they're coordinated, but that mismatch on one side is compensated for by the mismatch on the other side. That's why it's a playable game.
If town coordinated properly scums never win. I even suggested a blueprint for how nights should go once the mass claim happened. Who picked up the ball and said "Bur, you X, Cythare, you Y, and Jskura, you Z, while Proph, Rhand, and MisterSins do A, and Sepiriel does B, while Pizza does C"?
Those abilities would have complemented one another to a forced outing of the entire mafia team due to enemy skill alone, and I noted that in the scum chat.
And the mass claim itself could have happened many rounds sooner than it did, causing further problems for us.
Town left enough good tools in their toolbox that despite some scum miscues, we caught up to them.
There were some issues with the setup but unfairly favoring any team wasn't one of them, even Garland would have been fine with a non-botched claim. We had scanned Dante, he came back not Garland, so we moved on. He probably wins the endgame if he doesn't get outed by the mass claim, because we were in no position to deal with several weakened townies, let alone a nigh unkillable stealthy monster with dual night abilities.
@dan: I leveled my ATK first because I assumed that Power Strike was going to be Level + ATK damage, which would mean that when it was leveled, I would be doing, at most, as much as I would be doing had I simply maxed my ATK, first - and at Night, there was the potential of Roleblocking and protection getting in the way of my damage. So I figured thay, as a Fighter, I should simply be leveling my ATK, then my Skill, my HP when possible, and eventually, my Speed.
Multi-classing into Blue Mage was a mistake, and I wished I had chosen something else once Seppel explained the Order of Operations regarding Enemy Skill to me.
I was amazed when Bur didn't push the Enemy Skill plan, Pizza (yes, I read your walls), and when nobody called you out as scum for killing the puppy, and when nobody called Arch out for being scum when his entire set of actions for the endgame consisted of, "Push weak reasoning, Double Attack townie in first post of Day, lurk until Night".
But I guess that was all more obvious from an outside perspective.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
"Gotta analyze behaviour, dont waste time analyzing night actions"
I did want to say that I was very impressed with you, Pitzer, and I hope you will play a mini or something sometime because I would like to play a more traditional game with you.
That one post I made about how I wasn't paying attention to you when you said you were going to replace out and I regretted it... yeah. I was more suspicious than a strict null read then, but I knew I had nothing and I wasn't even close to sure I was right about being suspicious. So I figured, eh, I'll just hope you aren't scum and that if you are eventually something will happen or eventually the people alive will think, "wait, why is he still alive?" But that's a sign of how well you were playing, because I knew I didn't have the content to even try to start casing you, nor did I have the conviction that it was the correct angle to pursue, nor did I have the energy that I knew it'd take to stay engaged with the game enough to complete the lengthy debate that I knew something like that would pursue. So, basically, it's the only time in my mafia career that I've had a hunch that I chose not to at least explore because I thought the results would be futile. I think some of that was the lack of voting mechanic and some of it was that I was recovering from burn out/feeling burned with my Iso interchanges... but the main reason was that you were just playing so cleanly that I couldn't sell myself to do it/would have had a really hard time figuring out where to start, which I think is like the best compliment that you can pay a scum player.
Anyway. Congrats to the fiends and thanks to Seppel and Dan for the extraordinary efforts that went into this!
Town Win % = 75%
Mafia Win % = 75%
Overall Win % = 75%
Completed Game Log
2014: Best Mafia Performance (Group)
2014: Most Improved Player
2014: Best Town Player
2014: Best Overall Player
Town Win % = 75%
Mafia Win % = 75%
Overall Win % = 75%
Completed Game Log
2014: Best Mafia Performance (Group)
2014: Most Improved Player
2014: Best Town Player
2014: Best Overall Player
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
Town Win % = 75%
Mafia Win % = 75%
Overall Win % = 75%
Completed Game Log
2014: Best Mafia Performance (Group)
2014: Most Improved Player
2014: Best Town Player
2014: Best Overall Player
ATPG dancing through the thread with walls is exactly why I have begun to consider people scum just for posting walls. The amount of confusion he sowed was crazy.
This is the first game in a looooong time where I didn't feel constant suspicion, which allowed me to get away with a lot of BS with jumping on popular wagons.
It's really refreshing to see teammates who understand that distancing is not always bussing, sometimes it's just having interactions which appear disconnected, and subtle, less dramatic.
Despite my pressuring, questioning, and spotlighting Vezok, I was more distancing from him than bussing. Same with Megiddo.
The other thing is, when I've argued at length that someone is clear, people don't usually see that as a scum defending another scum. Any link between me and you, or me and KoolKoal, seemed to be discounted.
Sometimes the best distancing is to curl up in one another's arms and say how townie you look to me, I suppose. People are worried that links you together, but scums do that to townies and townies do that to other townies more often.
People don't typically assume it's 2 scums involved.
Seppel, I really liked the design of this game and I thought it was buckets of fun to play, even if the early game was super slow and uneventful. I just wish that I would have started with the Meditate and Strike ability or survived a bit longer to upgrade it. The level 5 version looks insane.
Previous Mafia Experience:
Mafia aligned: 2/0 -100%
Town aligned: 4/3 - 57%
I pretty much only get lynched when I'm a townie. Or there's a town detective. Then I always get lynched because I always get scanned because, uh.... I pretty much only ever get lynched when I'm a townie and people take note of that.
Can't read my, can't read my....
I have been watching it though, and more and more as the game progressed. I regretted a few times near the end here that I replaced out, but Proph, you did a much better job than I could have ever done.
I still don't think 5 month games are for me, no matter how well structured they are (because I think this was really well put together fwiw). I'm far too impatient. If you'll still have me though I'd love to play in a smaller game on this site. You have thoroughly entertained me.
I was privy to parts of the hair pulling that Pizza was doing after I replaced out, and I have to say you all had him on his toes for sure! He isn't lying when he says he was really worried at several points in the game. (So cute, so funny! )
Again, I think you all did an amazing job and stuck with it until the end, and I bow to the victors!
This was no cakewalk. We were fighting from behind and fighting a losing battle at times, most of the time.
There was one point before we knew about X Dance where I felt we were in really decent shape, and then Vezok exploded into a pile of flaming meat, and I started to freak out a tiny bit.
THAT COULD HAVE BEEN MEEEEEEE
I sent you a pm about that sep.
Edit: Rhand or DCIII for town MVP.
You weren't always right, but when you were, you were on fire. Sometimes you were right for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't really matter.
Need to figure out a way to translate that into stuff that folks can latch onto and follow, because you were all over Vezok and me both.
Good game to the scum team. I've said multiple times that this would probably go down as one of my worst games in recent memory (next to Celestial and the other games I was playing that contributed to the trainwreck there) and it turned out to be true. I like to think that I have a decent view of the gamestate in basically all of my town games I play, and this one fell quite short of the mark.
I planned to write out a treatise about why I thought this game's design was bad, but I'll refrain from that since most of it will just be me ranting at myself. It's just, I don't know how Seppel expected us to hold up throughout the game. Days 1-3 were good because all of the townie energy was still there and we caught Wheat. However, as the Days went on, most of the townies (myself included) just checked out of the game, which allowed the scum to take advantage of the loss of pace extremely easily.
Pizza: You were a bright light in this pit of despair and you were a genuine pleasure to play with. I think the reason why I ended up townreading you at the middle/end of the game was because I wanted you to be town since you were the only one of us to not become apathetic as the game went on. Thanks for playing, and I hope we can play together in future games!
I do what I can, people needed to engage with the game and have it be fun. It's more fun when people talk to you.
One of the responsibilities of the big bad evil people is to act sort of like a DM or player-controlled enemy character in a roleplaying game, understand that you're not the hero, you're there to be the challenge, your purpose is to create an antagonist for the heroes to fight against, you're almost like a co-host of the game, without you, there really is no game and nothing for townies to hunt.
It's another reason why I generally don't lurk. Providing challenge to the town involves engaging them, provoking them, trying to mislead them, and trying to get them to engage with the game and invest in it. Regardless of role I don't like it when players get down on themselves, or one another, and if people aren't having fun, is problem.
There was a lull in activity and energy in the early midgame and that gets largely countered when you take the time to engage with every person who is playing and challenging them to think and giving them something to think about and discuss.
It took a long, long, long time to bring down the town, and it would have been an utterly joyless and honorless endeavor if all the townies just simply checked out or resigned.
I really would rather play against a town that wants to defeat me really badly and has energy and enthusiasm.
It's sort of like an NFL football game- you kind of don't want your opponents to be missing their top players or for them to be injured, or lose by penalties, or any other sort of thing.
You want your opponents to be fighting fresh, with enthusiasm, at their best, wanting to win, and feeling like they can.
Regardless of how you feel about Tom Brady or Bill Belichick, or all the nonsense with the cheating accusations, some of which might even be true, especially past accusations of that, something that is generally agreed upon is that Bill is one of the best coaches of the modern era and Tom is one of the best quarterbacks, and if you face off against the Patriots, and Tom is out due to injury that season and they're missing their best players and Bill came down with syphilis and died, well, you haven't really beaten the Patriots, you beat their second stringers. It's a win but it doesn't feel as good as actually defeating the hall of famer championship level team you expect.
I like Peyton Manning, I like Aaron Rodgers. I get excited when my team plays against them. Because who cares if you beat a team that's 2 and 10? Who cares if you beat their backup quarterback? I want to see the very best of my opponents because it makes for a more interesting and engaging contest.
No-shows, injuries, second stringers, that's not what I want. I want the top people at their best.
PS you replacement players really stepped up, like I said. Much of the core of the town's brain by late middlegame was comprised of replacement players who didn't have to invest as much in this game because they probably didn't feel like it was their own, if they replaced in late.
We don't have a game if we don't have the participation. Letting the game run its course without any fire or passion seemed like a disservice to our game hosts and our fellow players.
I always want people to get involved. I never want to see folks feeling left out or ignored or feeling like they're not being heard.
Sometimes it might be to my advantage as scum if they're ignored, but, there's more to the game than getting a win due to safe and passive moves, or because the other team lost too many players midway through the game to put up a real fight.
I didn't want to lose any of you, and I hated that we lost a couple opponents due to inactivity, especially those who looked like they never intended to be inactive. I bet you any money RelmArrowny would have been a terrifying opponent if he hadn't left the game.
That's not how I want to win, and it's not how I want townies to lose. I also didn't want Garland to die from inactivity, then it felt like we didn't really beat him, he just left.
I felt like we beat him fair and square, as square as finding a new player scum due to mass claim really is, and the damage we gave him and the arguments we used to keep the focus on him.
I never want to be spotted a free townie death, I never want to lose players due to heated insult matches between them and other players, I never want people feeling excluded, and I don't want extra information. I think at one point the game mod posted something we weren't supposed to see in our scum chat, and deleted it, but we would have gotten a copy of it in our emails. Thankfully he pointed it out and I deleted it.
Extra advantages aren't fun. I like the game to be as fun and in keeping with the host's idea of balanced and by the rulebook as possible.
That's my approach. Then it feels better when you do prevail, against the odds, or if the game was pretty balanced even. Winning games lopsidedly with extra advantages isn't glorious or dramatic at all.
Blah blah blah wall o text.
On the other, the body wasn't willing.
A disappointing game for me. Nothing Seppel did wrong or anything.
Pizza I politely request a rematch in a normal game.
2014 - Best Mafia Performance (Individual)(Wu Tang)
2014 - Best Mafia Newcomer
2015 - Best Town Performance (Individual) (Predator)
2015 - Best Town Performance (Group) - Predator Mafia
2015 - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - 2015 Invitational
2015 - Best Town Player
2015 - Best Mafia Player
2015 - Best Overall Player
It wouldn't be a fair fight. Now you've seen how much I'm full of *****- I've got no chance. I'm like a henchman without a nametag.
I can't face off against you, you're too good.
But I accept anyway because honor and stuff.
{мы, тьма}
2012: Best (False?) Role Claim - Worst Town Performance (Group) - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - Best SK Performance - Best Overall Player
2013: Best Non-SK Neutral Performance
2014: Best Town Performance (Individual) - Best Town Performance (Group) - Most Interesting Role - Best Game - Best Overall Player
2015: Worst Mafia Performance (Group) - Best Read
2016: Best Town Performance (Group) - Best Town Player - Best Overall Player
Man oh man, what a dangerous guy you are. I look forward to facing you again.
2014 - Best Mafia Performance (Individual)(Wu Tang)
2014 - Best Mafia Newcomer
2015 - Best Town Performance (Individual) (Predator)
2015 - Best Town Performance (Group) - Predator Mafia
2015 - Best Mafia Performance (Group) - 2015 Invitational
2015 - Best Town Player
2015 - Best Mafia Player
2015 - Best Overall Player
I enjoyed playing with you guys.
I'm kinda pissed that I died by bull***** random ability, but it's ok.
Thanks to DNC at Heroes of the plane studios for this awesome sig and SGT_Chubbz for the awesome avy.
Check out the Shop Thread
Bad timing. Around that time of the game was when I really wanted to just quit mafia altogether.
Also, the day 1 - day 2 section of the game I was still trying to figure out how I should behave. There wasn't a whole lot that was actually happening due to the way the attacks were landing, and no lynched persons or murdered persons yet, so not much for me to comment on.
I also barely had any idea who people were and I couldn't get a handle on their personalities. I was very much in wait and see, and then, bad things happened and I wanted out. But, I got over it.
You have to guess I'm townie and be correct sometimes or else you haven't really figured me out yet.
Just always assume I'm townie and you'll be right more often than not, and the times you're wrong, it will be entertaining. Like a Michael Bay movie, just lots of explosions and fiery carnage, and space alien ninja zombie robots who are also pirates.