MTG Salvation

I'll get the writeup for this game done sometime late Thurs/Fri, since there's quite a bit I'd like to get to.

Thank you everyone for the positive comments; felt like this game was enjoyable to a lot of people despite some rough goings D1.

Retrospective

What worked:
Vote counts/general mod attentiveness
Activity of the game (in-game and in spectator chat)
Flavorful, clean role design

What didn't work:
Cantrip's role
Lack of day/night flavor
Deadline extension requests
General scumteam composition/Balance

Want to address general mod issues before I dive into the play of this game.

First off: Was really happy with my attentiveness as a mod this game, with regards to vote counts and mod questions. Tried to do a vote count nearly every 24 hours, with more sometimes depending on thread activity, and I think that was what really helped the game feel smooth and conclude in around two months (!). I think that's fairly rare among MTGS Specialties and I hope it becomes the norm in the future. I think in this new era of mafia, where real-time interaction is prized, having vote counts every 48 or 72 hours is not going to be good enough for your players. They expect to get mod questions answered immediately (via Discord or PM) and expect vote counts on the regular. I think that if you are active as a mod, your players will reciprocrate it and be active themselves, while if you're sluggish as a mod, there's less incentive to post as a player. Not sure how accurately that tracks, but I wanted this game to be all about the players, so I tried to do everything I could to make their game experience as fun/accomodating as possible.

One thing that I started to do was lock the game thread during Nights. This was something that I wanted to do because I've been in multiple games where people posted during the Night accidentally and it could be used to potentially confirm their alignment. Not sure how I feel about it because it does basically say to the playerbase "I don't trust you all enough to not accidentially post in the game threat at Night" but I would hate if people used a mistaken Night post to get out of game information about a player's alignment.

I was quite happy with how active the game was and in particular, how active the spectator chat was. My most favorite memories of MTGS Mafia back in the day was hanging out in spec chat with a bunch of experienced players and listening to their wisdom and observations about the current game-state. I remember I was so obsessed with this stupid game that I read old QuickTopics at lunchtime when I was in high school. (Probably should have been doing literally anything else with my time, but I enjoyed it!) I'm glad that this game's spectator chat was so active, because it meant that people were invested about the outcome of the game and cared about it.

The last thing that I'd like to touch on is that I thought the general role design was successful for the most part. I think this game perfectly exemplifies the way that good specialties should be designed. IMO, good specialties should be designed in a way where every player gets a role, but each individual role is either narrow or weak. This reduces the inherent swing of Specialties and makes the endgame become more about behavioral analysis and analyzing the validity of claims, rather than it being "this person is scum because [mechanical reason]". If you want to figure out night actions/mechanical logic over behavior, then there are other sites that cater to that. But one of the reasons why MTGS Mafia still continues to this day is because of the emphasis of strong behavioral analysis over anything else, IMO.

Think my most favorite roles were KittyCupCake's role and osieorb's role on the town side, and Azrael's role on the mafia side. Even though it didn't happen in this game, it would have been fun to see the town react to the public announcing of the Tron lands. I like KCC's role a lot because enabling private communication between any two players just adds more fun to the game. I really enjoyed reading Cantripmancer's and Vaimes's chat up until they died. osie's role I liked because it has so many decision points - when do you use it, and what choices/targets you select, are all choices that can either make the role a simple french vanilla role or a powerful one that impacts the game.

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As for things that I think could have improved on:

I think Cantrip's role was kind of a mess and it was the only role in the game that required outside M:tG knowledge, and I should have probably just redesigned it. My goal of the role was to get the Meddling Mage flavor on a mafia role but it was done in a way where 1) the role was just extremely confusing for anyone who isn't familiar with Magic/the Modern metagame and 2) the role either did nothing or it punished the mafia for using their mod-provided falseclaims, as it did here. Imagine if the role randed onto someone like Vaimes, for instance. I do think it's a pretty cool top-down design objectively speaking but the play patterns of the role are just not great.

The lack of day/night flavor is just purely my fault, but I'm not sure who even reads in-game flavor unless a lot of time was put into it anyways. One thing I am considering if I ever design a mafia game in the future is just pre-writing all of the flavor in advance so I don't have to come up with contrived flavor scenes written from my not-very-creative brain at awkward hours of the day. In my opinion though, I think players appreciate timely EoD lynch scene postings over you spending an extra two hours delaying the flip just so you can write some poorly written fanfiction, so that was what I was going for throughout the mid-end game there.

At the end of Day 1, the deadline extension requests were interesting to me because some players requested through PM strongly objecting to a deadline extension request. This occured to me that the very act of requesting a deadline extension could be alignment indicative. Moving forward I would probably just tell everyone to PM me their specifications on deadline extensions because then it is purely an out of game thing and not something that could factor into a player's read on someone else. This is something super minor but I wanted to bring it up anyways.

I talked about game balance a lot in the spectator chat, so if you want some more insight on my design philosophies then you can feel free to read in there. Generally speaking, when designing a complicated game of this caliber, my measure for balance is asking myself "does each side have a chance to win the game" rather than trying to aim for 50/50 perfect balance. The reason for this is because it's essentially impossible to determine perfect balance in a complex game like this one. I think this game was probably 55/45 in favor of the town here because some of the town's roles were more powerful than I were anticipating (Cantrip's role) and I think that the scum's power level should have been evened out a little more. The mafia had one extremely powerful role (Azrael's Tron) and a lot more weaker roles (Grapefruit's delayer, Lastwhisper's Izzet Phoenix role). Think if I upgrade the delayer to a straight roleblocker and probably gave Lastwhisper a trinket ability then it becomes a little closer to 50/50. This was the first time that I concentrated a lot of the mafia's power on having proveable falseclaims as opposed to having strong scum abilities, and I think I missed the mark a little bit there.

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As for the play: I think that this game had one of the most high-level playerbases I've seen recently in a MTGS game. A fair number of people came out of retirement for this one - KCC, dkings, Megiddo are people I haven't seen play a mafia game in years, and the average player quality was extremely high. Thus, I think that no matter what scumteam this playerbase randed, they were going to have a tough time.

I think the town were absolutely outplaying the scum during Days 1 and 2. Think scum suffered some activity/thread presence issues during Day 1 - Azrael/tom were low activity, and Lastwhisper was trying to find a footing in the thread after Syrenz replaced out, while I think Grapefruit was on the middling end of the activity spectrum. I think this general lack of thread presence during Day 1 really served to put them on the back foot in the early game. Meanwhile, the town was just on fire - Rhand and dkings in particular were projecting their towniness quite well and had very accurate reads. It's hard to imagine a player as good as Azrael get lynched Day 1, but in a high-caliber playerlist like this one, nobody is really off the table.

Day 2 was going decently well for the scum since tom was able to hold the entire thread hostage by sitting on his daykill, but Axelrod's last-second case on Grapefruit, plus Grapefruit not claiming optimally resulted in his lynch. From there, scum were really against the wall - Vaimes had a hit counter on Lastwhisper and tom was still under some suspicion with how he utilized his daykill to essentially murder a townie in pure daylight. Plus, Cantrip was essentially cop-checking tom too.

The fact that they were able to pull off town lynches Days 3 and 4 was nothing short of a miracle, yet they did. I think this was a combination of the following factors:

- Complacency with already lynching two scum
- Both of the scum navigating a very narrow tightrope to push suspicion on the other behaviorally suspect townies
- Vaimes vigging KCC over Last
- Cantrip not trusting his own results

It was extremely impressive that tom was able to slink out of the noose for so long and force the game into a lylo situation when the town was massively ahead over the scumteam. Due to tom's daykill and Vaimes's misvig, the town essentially had one less mislynch to work with, so the town only had three total mislynches to work with. Lylo was especially funny, as there were three confirmed town (Sir Chris/Axelrod/shadowlancerx) versus two unknowns (vezok/last) and the town was able to successfully get there.

Think I have to give Axelrod the Town MVP status and tomsloger the Mafia MVP status, though.

Axelrod just fit in the archetype of players I like to call "quietly competent". Not always the flashiest player; not always the most loud player; but just very consistently /correct/ and was able to remove himself from the mislynch pool early by catching Grape. He was specifically a very huge boon in lylo as well; putting in nearly all of the work to determine the last scum by himself. I know he had some quibbles about how weak his role was but I thought he was able to use it fantastically in order to trap the last scum in a checkmate position.

tomsloger, on the other hand, deserves major props to being stone-faced and being able to convince the majority of the town to go along with the Killjoy and osieorb mislynches before finally being felled himself. If lastwhisper was able to convince the town to lynch vez then I would have given the MVP to him. Either way, both of the surviving scum played fantastically and both deserve major props for their play.

Was also quite impressed by Rhand, dkings, osie (for solving the game despite his mislynch), Lastwhisper, and shadow's performances.

And that's mostly all I've got. Can expound on different parts of this game if you have a specific question; I love talking about mafia despite not having a whole lot of time to play the game these days.

Thanks for osieorb, Megiddo, and Lastwhisper for replacing in, and thanks to Bur and Silvercrys for reviewing this monstrosity of a game. I know I designed this game about a year ago, and the review process took around a month or two, then queue limbo caused this game to be put on the backburner for a couple of months - in case you were wondering how long the process is to run a game like this one is.

And thanks to everyone who played this game, too. I'll probably poke my head back in here when I have a little more free time and play a game or two. Just.. not a fan of Micros since it's not "real mafia" to me, and I think I've reviewed a fair number of games on the queue. Not sure what setup I'll design next but you'll probably know once it goes in signups.