Sorry I thought I busted you, Vaimes. I just really never believed that every single person voting CropCircles prior to his self-vote was town. To me he seemed very clearly town, and I always felt there had to be at least one in those initial five or so people who voted for him that was mafia.
I agree with Highroller that the vitality function was super meh. As a pretty vanilla role, I don't want to make myself more vulnerable to Nightkills just to open a one-way Neighborhood.
Sorry I thought I busted you, Vaimes. I just really never believed that every single person voting CropCircles prior to his self-vote was town. To me he seemed very clearly town, and I always felt there had to be at least one in those initial five or so people who voted for him that was mafia.
Sorry I strongly townread you except for the one Day that actually mattered.
Although, you're the first/only person on MTGS to have misyeeted me, I believe, so I don't feel as bad that the tables have turned.
I agree with Highroller that the vitality function was super meh. As a pretty vanilla role, I don't want to make myself more vulnerable to Nightkills just to open a one-way Neighborhood.
Sorry I thought I busted you, Vaimes. I just really never believed that every single person voting CropCircles prior to his self-vote was town. To me he seemed very clearly town, and I always felt there had to be at least one in those initial five or so people who voted for him that was mafia.
Sorry I strongly townread you except for the one Day that actually mattered.
Although, you're the first/only person on MTGS to have misyeeted me, I believe, so I don't feel as bad that the tables have turned.
Yeah I spoke about this in Discord.
I'm not really certain if I should have voiced a larger opinion during review stage about this issue. The game from a design perspective was relatively balanced, but it wasn't a "Flashy" game. Arkham one attempted to play around with this vitality system too, and the more I see of them the more I dislike them due to how impossible they seem to balance. You either A) Allow abilities to go off at all times, which then brings in the question of why have a V system or B) Basically stifle players in only being able to use abilities a few times.
I'm less and less interested in playing around with neighborhood chats after seeing this and the game on MC that played with hood chats.
The game was scum sided. This was due to the design team over valuing how town sided the chats would be and not properly calibrating the vitality.
So on this. I think there are multiple things people will point to. First he town roles being effectively 1 shot for the most part, second the scum pooling vitality, third the lack of information, and forth the extra killing power.
In reverse the extra killing power was overdone. The poison should not have been in the game. Just a massive mistake by me. I think Regal's (Sloth's) steal was fine but he should have started with less vitality not that it really mattered. Both together was way too much and the confusion around the extra vitality loss that killed GJ just destroyed the town.
On the lack of information this feeds back into our misread of the chats. We felt that they'd be more townsided. Which I think to some extent they almost were. Bur garnered many town reads through his chats for example. Where we got the levers wrong was with undershooting on the Wit (1 message per phase and that short of a word limit was so weak) and not learning my lesson from secret agents that people will hoard their resources if you don't give them a motivation to spend them. The other thing was that Ketricken (CC) was the flagship information role for town and it didn't go according to plan. Bee had been various iterations of investigative but got nerfed into the ground when we were trying to weaken the town, some of the iterations would have been too powerful but I went to far in knocking her down.
I actually think the scum pooling Vit was fine. Their abilities were barely vitality gated and the sharing was mostly a way to give them a large pool to use the Skill if they wanted to but keep their overall vitality low so Jinna and Chade could kill them.
Lastly in role madness games like this you either have to give scum completely absurd roles or really limit the town. It's hard to give town satisfying powerful roles in role madness while keeping the game balanced. I did not hit the right levels here and basically designed a scum team that wouldn't have been insane (minus the poison which was bad) in a game with fewer PR's and made multiple weak town roles. A theme of the design was that we wanted to reward coordination and skilled play and have less automatic power. Chade (Cuth) I think is my favorite design of the game. The ability to gain extra shots by predicting who would be condemned seemed to be both fun and a satisfying reward. It also changed behavior slightly but not so much as to skew the game. Similarly I was please with the design of Burrich (Anak). I think it was used sub-optimally but tension between wanting to bond to start Wit chats and the need to wait and pick a good target I think was a really interesting design. On the opposite end Hest (Cantrip) didn't really work or make sense and was just a mess of a role. The idea was to confirm someone was telling the truth and give them a bonus but that's just not the way trackers are generally used and 1V is so anemic as to be pointless. The design was for most of the PR's to be one shot if nothing went right for town but give them outs through good play to gain extra uses.
The lower individual power level and attempted focus on coordination just seems like it was less enjoyable for most players. I can disagree on assessments of some roles (I think Verity is strong than HR did) but overall GJ is right that his role was basically a worse VT. And that feels awful as a player. My biggest takeaway from this design is to put more weight on the individual player experience and worry a tiny bit less about overall balance because things are swingy and hard to predict.
So what would I definitely have changed?
1. Eliminate the poison.
2. Reword Jinna so the fact that the players bonded to are valid targets as well is obvious.
3. Return Bee to a shot limited investigative of some kind.
4. The Fool would gain start with 2 or 3V.
5. Tweak the Skill so that there was more of an incentive to send messages.
6. Buff the wit a little.
7. Give the scum team another vitality sink.
8. Verity. See below.
Jinna (Wisp) was intended to be a chaos agent accelerating the game. His role was supposed to have a good chance to win (close to 50% to match town/scum in a balanced world) and act as a rubberband agent between the two factions. His claiming immediately made it not that, but I was overall very happy with the role and it's place in the game. Except it was maybe a little too easy to win and lead to speculation based on Wit distribution.
And the fiasco that was the wording of having the Wit and being witted. It was overly confusing and helped lead to Wisp thinking it was nigh impossible for him to win.
I mostly stand by this design. I know not all players like 3rd party roles but I think they are worthwhile over all and despite it not playing out the way I imagined at all I think it added an interesting tension to the game. I do wish it hadn't derailed the game the way it had and focused the conversation for so many days but I'm still happy with it.
Verity (Highroller) needed another pass. It was the second most iterated role and changed drastically several times. I actually really like the underlying design but it was too punishing to use. I fell in love with the flavor aspect and overrode concerns about the posting restriction (which was initially much harsher). I was too attached to flavor and not worried enough about the play experience here.
This role was divisive all throughout the design. I absolutely loved the flavor of the quest, transform, slumber mechanic and I do think that some players (myself included) would enjoy the altered posting restriction and the ever growing chat network. But it wasn't for everyone and a social game like this needs to be designed with the median player in mind. The balance wasn't there at all for this role as it was designed on top of the problems of enjoyment for the median player.
I think it's okay to put 1 role into a game that's going to be of niche interest but two is too much and between Jinna and Verity there were two here.
Spoilers for the novel and how it ties to the role below.
Verity in the books is the King in waiting to a kingdom on the brink, they are suffering raids from a viking like force that is somehow turning their victims into empathy lacking shells of people that will kill their own children for the clothes they are wearing, his father is infirm, his brother is a spoiled brat unconcerned with the raiders, and half of the kingdom prefers his brother to him. Verity is stretching himself thin using the Skill to impart false vision into the captians of the raiding ships so they run aground and crash their vessels. But it's taking a toll on him physically and isn't sustainable. So Verity departs with a some of his best men for the Mountain Kingdom to seek out the mystical Elderlings and ask them for help. What he finds is a garden of dragon statues and a quarry of magical rock that seems react to the Skill, absorb memories, but also replay whoever put their memories them when you touch it. So he pours his own life and memory into the rock making a dragon of his own eventually pouring his entire life into it, awakening his stone dragon temporarily and driving back the raiders completely.
So with that in mind I fell in love the idea of a quest (losing vitality) losing your memories and going to sleep unless awakened (the slumber), and losing your mind to the Skill (the expanding chats). What I couldn't nail down was the pay off.
So the pay off for transforming needed to be more impactful if all of those restrictions were going to be in place. And we cycled through a bunch of different ones. Osie posted a couple in the discord that were wisely abandoned (though one went on to become Tintaglia's Awakening). I also cycled through a public cop check, a vig, and a desperado. None of them really fit in with the rest of the game but the strongman enabler wasn't a good fit (really that should have been Fitz! Kicking myself over the missed opportunity there despite liking his role too). DV and Osie were great here shooting down some truly horrendous designs and really pressing me to make sure this was what I wanted. And it was but it wasn't fun for HR and I'm sorry about that.
Also he was a giant stone dragon! Definitely should have changed the transform to be hard to kill after the fact even though well the spoilers.
So on the actual game. I actually think most people played okay. There just was so little coordination or teamwork. We kept remarking in the dead chat how collectively the town basically had the right PoE but there was no agreement and the fall back options were always town. Despite having strong town reads throughout the game (Tammy, KJ, Bur) there just never was a town block that was working together and that more than anything I think sunk the town.
I think the entire scum team played pretty well. Boom came into a slot that looked doomed and took it to the end game. Plus really helped revitalize the energy. Bessie was a massive moral boost in the scum chat and her wonderful walls garnered town reads for a long time. Tubba was just a survivor and fought through everything and managed to surive till day 5 despite looking like he was dead to rights on day 2. But I have to give Sloth my scum team MVP award. He dragged the team along through the pre replacement disaster when it looked like town could sweep the game and once he had reinforcements kept the effort and energy up and made it the end game with Boom. They all deserve a lot of credit and it was a really fun team to watch after we got through the replacements.
Wisp also deserves some credit. He won as a third party despite out himself early which isn't an easy thing to do. And he did all of this despite hating third parties in general. I said some unkind things in the early dead chat because I loved my mental image of the role too much and considering his putting to be almost playing against his win con but it wasn't, he won, and managed to never be under much serious pressure.
On the town side there were some crazy swings. The first was Iso bonding to Az as soon as the day start. Tying your vitality battery to the other high vitality role was just bad. Another major one was Wisp draining Cuth and delaying the Vig shot. The craziest swing though was obviously Night 4. So setting the scene there were 10 alive (6s4w) and Cuth had a vig shot he was itching to use. Scum could win that night if Cuth missed his vig shot (or it didn't kill Sloth). They decided to go for the fancy play and to try and win on the spot rather than blocking Cuth with the RB and going into a 9 person Condemn or Lose. And for a second I thought it paid off because Bessie had been doc'd by Tammy to protect her from Cuth's shot, but I'd forgotten the scum team blocked Tammy on top of shooting her.
Anyway I thought the game was a very enjoyable read with several swings in momentum. I hope you all enjoyed it! Thank you so much for playing and thanks again to Osie and DV for helping me get the game ready!
This game reminds me of Secret Agent Mafia in which there was a mechanic called "burner phones" which allowed the players to use money to create a neighbor chat. Except this was pointless, because neighboring is not a particularly useful ability, and is, at times, an outright liability due to the fact that, unlike with masons, you don't know the role of the other person. Neighboring is probably the most useless ability in mafia that isn't just an outright posting or voting restriction.
This game had that same design problem except cranked up to eleven because the ENTIRE GAME revolved around being a neighborizer, and on top of that, neighboring required making yourself easier to kill in order to use.
Not to mention so many of the roles just became weaker versions of already existing roles. Mafia functions fine when an inspector can just inspect, when a doctor can just freely protect a person. In this game, we had roles that were weaker that had to kill themselves to use their abilities. Why?
I addressed a lot of the rest of this post elsewhere but the secret agents game was my game as well. I have been obsessed with this design space because of an old Azrael game I read when I was first starting mafia. I found the design amazing and had been trying to do different tweaks to his design as I found it excellent. But I have (finally Ecophagy) come to the conclusion that it's just not as interesting of a design space as I hoped. I think Bur used it really well and it was interesting but overall it just wasn't interesting enough. And I think the empowerment mechanic Az used was more dynamic than my vitality system.
When players agree to a specialty game like this they expect more than just a one shot track as their role.
A thought I just had on improving vitality is that players should have been informed how much the NK did would have helped with the feeling several people have described of needing to hoard vitality. With the drain around it might still have happened but at least a player at 3 vitality might feel freed to use it after a mass claim.
This game reminds me of Secret Agent Mafia in which there was a mechanic called "burner phones" which allowed the players to use money to create a neighbor chat. Except this was pointless, because neighboring is not a particularly useful ability, and is, at times, an outright liability due to the fact that, unlike with masons, you don't know the role of the other person. Neighboring is probably the most useless ability in mafia that isn't just an outright posting or voting restriction.
This game had that same design problem except cranked up to eleven because the ENTIRE GAME revolved around being a neighborizer, and on top of that, neighboring required making yourself easier to kill in order to use.
Not to mention so many of the roles just became weaker versions of already existing roles. Mafia functions fine when an inspector can just inspect, when a doctor can just freely protect a person. In this game, we had roles that were weaker that had to kill themselves to use their abilities. Why?
I addressed a lot of the rest of this post elsewhere but the secret agents game was my game as well. I have been obsessed with this design space because of an old Azrael game I read when I was first starting mafia. I found the design amazing and had been trying to do different tweaks to his design as I found it excellent. But I have (finally Ecophagy) come to the conclusion that it's just not as interesting of a design space as I hoped. I think Bur used it really well and it was interesting but overall it just wasn't interesting enough. And I think the empowerment mechanic Az used was more dynamic than my vitality system.
When players agree to a specialty game like this they expect more than just a one shot track as their role.
A thought I just had on improving vitality is that players should have been informed how much the NK did would have helped with the feeling several people have described of needing to hoard vitality. With the drain around it might still have happened but at least a player at 3 vitality might feel freed to use it after a mass claim.
I think the power of the hood chats with Azreals game is that they were sort of "Tacked on". The main power of that game was something else entirely.
The game I'm most fond of with hood chats is Ace Attorney, which was a very unique way of having that mechanic.
I have been obsessed with this design space because of an old Azrael game I read when I was first starting mafia. I found the design amazing and had been trying to do different tweaks to his design as I found it excellent. But I have (finally Ecophagy) come to the conclusion that it's just not as interesting of a design space as I hoped. I think Bur used it really well and it was interesting but overall it just wasn't interesting enough. And I think the empowerment mechanic Az used was more dynamic than my vitality system.
I was going to ask if the experiment was over now. It's a shame that you haven't cracked it to your satisfaction, but ultimately the problem is that although chats are fun, they are actually so low value (despite being consistently over-evaluated as +town) that people won't use them - especially not if they cost resources. I think it's no surprise that the Bur used the chats best here because his were free. But free chats have their own problem of taking content away from the thread.
Maybe there's some space in attaching chats to roles - like Track a player and get a chat with them. So the chat doesn't cost anything, but would probably influence your choice of action target. But I don't think there would be enough to build a whole game around that.
Quote from Grapefruit »
When players agree to a specialty game like this they expect more than just a one shot track as their role.
I'm not sure I agree - I think people want a cool, cohesive experience. Strong flavour, lots going on, and maybe an additional mechanic to play around with sure. But I think players respect that you can't have a game where every role is uber cool - sometimes you need a one-shot track (or even vanillas!) to glue to game together. The game itself just needs to be cool enough that just being part of the experience is fun.
Chats are useful if there are mechanics conversations you want to have away from the rest of the thread, but there's always the problem that you don't know how much to safely share with the other person and who to trust. Most behavior info should go to the thread, and that's most of the communication in any given game.
There were some interesting tricks you could pull, but to make them really central to the gameplay, there need to be abilities that encourage use of that design space, despite the risks.
I did enjoy them here, and the setup was fine. The town lost this based on our play, decisively.
Thank you for running it grapefruit. I enjoyed the setup and flavor, and now I want to put this series on my to read lost.
Sorry my reads suckedso badly. Worst reads I’ve had in a long time. There were some things that bugged me about scum that I’d see and promptly forget about 10 minutes later, so rip Tammy’s thoughts and reads.
The series is absolutely incredible. Highly recommend it. Liveship traders was a bit more eh, but anything with Fitz and the Fool - I don't know that I've ever seen fantasy characters written so beautifully, period.
Re: wolves pooling vitality I don't think that was a huge problem on its own, but when looking at the roles it feels like e.g. the Roleblocker was meant to be shot-limited like most of the town roles and allowing the vit thief to steal a vit every night and turn that into a roleblock essentially removes the shot limit at no real opportunity cost
By itself this isn't a problem; as I said on Discord I tend to favor wolf sided night actions because absent extra killing power the "worst" that can happen is the game becomes mountainous. But combined with the extra killing power the vit steal and factional poison gave I think it was a little too much to have a full roleblocker on top, yes
Re: vitality in general, I don't think this design space is exhausted quite yet, but! I think a game like this needs some inbuilt way for players to generate vitality (for example, if you do not take an action at night you gain 1V) and also "if you reach 0V you die" isn't as interesting as designers usually think it is. Instead of doing that just have death effects like normal and the penalty for having 0V is you can't use your abilities
I'd point to a fairly old now but well received example of this type of mechanic in Star Trek MU IV; a handful of roles in that game had a money mechanic and had a weak ability that generated money and one or two stronger abilities that spent it (e.g. +1: motion detector, -2: full track, -3: full watch as an investigative role). It creates a similar amount of tension between saving and expending resources while giving players something to do while they're "charging up".
Re: chat design space, I think making the Skill once per phase and not cost Vitality would have helped; when Skill shots and your role shots are connected to the same resource it feels pretty bad to spend it sending a message when you can save it to try to get a vig shot or another doctor shot (or not die to the vit pinger). This obv. would have required some retooling of roles whose entire purpose was to use the Skill for free, but it would also have resolved the "wolves need to pool vit to use the skill and still have low enough vit to not be bulletproof" which accidentally turns into "oh the wolves can just use the roleblock forever" and gives you more control over which roles actually die to the vit pinger (it seemed obvious to me that you wanted me to be vulnerable to the vit pinger but also able to use the Skill, otherwise you would have given me 3
or 4 vit or 1 vit instead of exactly 2... but maybe I'm mistaken)
I would like to say for the record though, I wouldn't account this game a mechanical failure at all; almost everything was fine, very good even, I don't want my criticism to overshadow the stuff that worked. I just like to take games apart to see what makes them tick and put them back together again lol.
Azrael and Anak's roles were very good, Cuth's role... isn't something I'm as fond of as you are lol but it worked pretty well. My role, Bur's and Tammy's were safe designs but very solid and functional.
99% of the game was great, 8/10 would play again, and I'd also like to thank you for hosting again.
Lastly in role madness games like this you either have to give scum completely absurd roles or really limit the town. It's hard to give town satisfying powerful roles in role madness while keeping the game balanced.
This is silly to me.
1. If you can't give people fun roles, don't give people roles at all. The goal is to make a fun game.
2. As I said before, mafia has always been able to function with an inspector, doctor, etc. It works just fine.
Roles that cost more to do less make little sense. "Oh no, if we give people powers, they might use them! They might even keep using them night after night! We can't have that!"
If you don't want people using their powers, don't give them powers. Just make a vanilla game.
I can disagree on assessments of some roles (I think Verity is strong than HR did)
Verity is among the worst-designed roles I've ever seen. I would have preferred being a vanilla town.
Also, I get that you're in love with the flavor, and I've never read the books, but is turning into a dragon supposed to suck? Is it something you should avoid? Is turning into a dragon supposed to be the worst thing?
Or are you supposed to feel like a badass? "Holy *****, I'm a ******* dragon!"
1. If you can't give people fun roles, don't give people roles at all. The goal is to make a fun game.
2. As I said before, mafia has always been able to function with an inspector, doctor, etc. It works just fine. Roles that cost more to do less make little sense.
I agree with number 1 but I don't agree with number 2. I don't think the classic roles are particularly fun. Doc is more or less fine (which is why it was in the game and the most aggressively costed town role) but it would require very specific circumstances for me to include a inspector into a game. If I need hard confirms I think there are much more fun roles to do it with. That said I agree in a few spots I missed making the game fun as the prime directive.
Verity is among the worst-designed roles I've ever seen.
Also, I get that you're in love with the flavor, and I've never read the books, but is turning into a dragon supposed to suck? Is it something you should avoid? Is turning into a dragon supposed to be the worst thing?
Or are you supposed to feel like a badass? "Holy *****, I'm a ******* dragon!"
The latter seems more fun to me.
Hey. here's a thought, what if Verity's role... Had no drawbacks? Start from there.
The latter is more fun but in this case transforming into a dragon is something that does suck. Like a lot. Like so much that if you were raised Catholic you can't help but see parallels to the passion. As for the role itself I definitely missed on the vitality going down, which is the biggest miss of the game in general. Outside of that I think the role is okay. Except I should have lifted the posting restriction in the last 48 hours of a game day.
The latter is more fun but in this case transforming into a dragon is something that does suck. Like a lot.
Oh well :/ . I mean. mission accomplished if that's the case.
The biggest problem aside from Vit is that Verity's role has zero utility until you know the roles of other people. On this site, mass claims don't generally happen before day 3. So the role is useless before day 3, pretty much. And then it's useless afterward.
I think the neighborizer thing is a dry well. Either make masons or find a more useful mechanic to experiment with would be my advice. Or just let everyone talk during night, just not vote.
I am sorry for taking so long to post this, I had intended to read the all the game posts I missed, and the chats, so that I could give some constructive feedback, but a week later and I still haven’t had a chance, and I didn’t want to delay any longer.
Thank you Grapefruit for running the game. The flavor and roles were awesome! I think the balance was ok, it seams scum-sided in retrospect, but if town had lynched mafia early, and mafia had targeted players with too much vitality to kill, perhaps the game would have appeared town sided. I do think that you overestimated the value of neighbor chat for town, more so because wasn’t skill chats one way only? I only had skill with Bur who could have a two way chat. I think the chat mechanics and cost were fine, just that they weren’t of much real value to town. On my home site we had third-party roles in most of our games, so I generally like them.
Thanks to everyone for making me feel welcome on this site, especially Osie for inviting me and Silvercrys who was the first to welcome me, and to my awesome scum partners. My dog sends a special shout out to Sloth and Chandler, his new buddies.. I like this community and would like to play again with you.
Although, you're the first/only person on MTGS to have misyeeted me, I believe, so I don't feel as bad that the tables have turned.
Yeah I spoke about this in Discord.
I'm not really certain if I should have voiced a larger opinion during review stage about this issue. The game from a design perspective was relatively balanced, but it wasn't a "Flashy" game. Arkham one attempted to play around with this vitality system too, and the more I see of them the more I dislike them due to how impossible they seem to balance. You either A) Allow abilities to go off at all times, which then brings in the question of why have a V system or B) Basically stifle players in only being able to use abilities a few times.
I'm less and less interested in playing around with neighborhood chats after seeing this and the game on MC that played with hood chats.
The poison victim was GJ - killing him actually WAS an accident.
The game was scum sided. This was due to the design team over valuing how town sided the chats would be and not properly calibrating the vitality.
So on this. I think there are multiple things people will point to. First he town roles being effectively 1 shot for the most part, second the scum pooling vitality, third the lack of information, and forth the extra killing power.
In reverse the extra killing power was overdone. The poison should not have been in the game. Just a massive mistake by me. I think Regal's (Sloth's) steal was fine but he should have started with less vitality not that it really mattered. Both together was way too much and the confusion around the extra vitality loss that killed GJ just destroyed the town.
On the lack of information this feeds back into our misread of the chats. We felt that they'd be more townsided. Which I think to some extent they almost were. Bur garnered many town reads through his chats for example. Where we got the levers wrong was with undershooting on the Wit (1 message per phase and that short of a word limit was so weak) and not learning my lesson from secret agents that people will hoard their resources if you don't give them a motivation to spend them. The other thing was that Ketricken (CC) was the flagship information role for town and it didn't go according to plan. Bee had been various iterations of investigative but got nerfed into the ground when we were trying to weaken the town, some of the iterations would have been too powerful but I went to far in knocking her down.
I actually think the scum pooling Vit was fine. Their abilities were barely vitality gated and the sharing was mostly a way to give them a large pool to use the Skill if they wanted to but keep their overall vitality low so Jinna and Chade could kill them.
Lastly in role madness games like this you either have to give scum completely absurd roles or really limit the town. It's hard to give town satisfying powerful roles in role madness while keeping the game balanced. I did not hit the right levels here and basically designed a scum team that wouldn't have been insane (minus the poison which was bad) in a game with fewer PR's and made multiple weak town roles. A theme of the design was that we wanted to reward coordination and skilled play and have less automatic power. Chade (Cuth) I think is my favorite design of the game. The ability to gain extra shots by predicting who would be condemned seemed to be both fun and a satisfying reward. It also changed behavior slightly but not so much as to skew the game. Similarly I was please with the design of Burrich (Anak). I think it was used sub-optimally but tension between wanting to bond to start Wit chats and the need to wait and pick a good target I think was a really interesting design. On the opposite end Hest (Cantrip) didn't really work or make sense and was just a mess of a role. The idea was to confirm someone was telling the truth and give them a bonus but that's just not the way trackers are generally used and 1V is so anemic as to be pointless. The design was for most of the PR's to be one shot if nothing went right for town but give them outs through good play to gain extra uses.
The lower individual power level and attempted focus on coordination just seems like it was less enjoyable for most players. I can disagree on assessments of some roles (I think Verity is strong than HR did) but overall GJ is right that his role was basically a worse VT. And that feels awful as a player. My biggest takeaway from this design is to put more weight on the individual player experience and worry a tiny bit less about overall balance because things are swingy and hard to predict.
So what would I definitely have changed?
1. Eliminate the poison.
2. Reword Jinna so the fact that the players bonded to are valid targets as well is obvious.
3. Return Bee to a shot limited investigative of some kind.
4. The Fool would gain start with 2 or 3V.
5. Tweak the Skill so that there was more of an incentive to send messages.
6. Buff the wit a little.
7. Give the scum team another vitality sink.
8. Verity. See below.
Jinna (Wisp) was intended to be a chaos agent accelerating the game. His role was supposed to have a good chance to win (close to 50% to match town/scum in a balanced world) and act as a rubberband agent between the two factions. His claiming immediately made it not that, but I was overall very happy with the role and it's place in the game. Except it was maybe a little too easy to win and lead to speculation based on Wit distribution.
And the fiasco that was the wording of having the Wit and being witted. It was overly confusing and helped lead to Wisp thinking it was nigh impossible for him to win.
I mostly stand by this design. I know not all players like 3rd party roles but I think they are worthwhile over all and despite it not playing out the way I imagined at all I think it added an interesting tension to the game. I do wish it hadn't derailed the game the way it had and focused the conversation for so many days but I'm still happy with it.
Verity (Highroller) needed another pass. It was the second most iterated role and changed drastically several times. I actually really like the underlying design but it was too punishing to use. I fell in love with the flavor aspect and overrode concerns about the posting restriction (which was initially much harsher). I was too attached to flavor and not worried enough about the play experience here.
This role was divisive all throughout the design. I absolutely loved the flavor of the quest, transform, slumber mechanic and I do think that some players (myself included) would enjoy the altered posting restriction and the ever growing chat network. But it wasn't for everyone and a social game like this needs to be designed with the median player in mind. The balance wasn't there at all for this role as it was designed on top of the problems of enjoyment for the median player.
I think it's okay to put 1 role into a game that's going to be of niche interest but two is too much and between Jinna and Verity there were two here.
Spoilers for the novel and how it ties to the role below.
So with that in mind I fell in love the idea of a quest (losing vitality) losing your memories and going to sleep unless awakened (the slumber), and losing your mind to the Skill (the expanding chats). What I couldn't nail down was the pay off.
So the pay off for transforming needed to be more impactful if all of those restrictions were going to be in place. And we cycled through a bunch of different ones. Osie posted a couple in the discord that were wisely abandoned (though one went on to become Tintaglia's Awakening). I also cycled through a public cop check, a vig, and a desperado. None of them really fit in with the rest of the game but the strongman enabler wasn't a good fit (really that should have been Fitz! Kicking myself over the missed opportunity there despite liking his role too). DV and Osie were great here shooting down some truly horrendous designs and really pressing me to make sure this was what I wanted. And it was but it wasn't fun for HR and I'm sorry about that.
Also he was a giant stone dragon! Definitely should have changed the transform to be hard to kill after the fact even though well the spoilers.
I think the entire scum team played pretty well. Boom came into a slot that looked doomed and took it to the end game. Plus really helped revitalize the energy. Bessie was a massive moral boost in the scum chat and her wonderful walls garnered town reads for a long time. Tubba was just a survivor and fought through everything and managed to surive till day 5 despite looking like he was dead to rights on day 2. But I have to give Sloth my scum team MVP award. He dragged the team along through the pre replacement disaster when it looked like town could sweep the game and once he had reinforcements kept the effort and energy up and made it the end game with Boom. They all deserve a lot of credit and it was a really fun team to watch after we got through the replacements.
Wisp also deserves some credit. He won as a third party despite out himself early which isn't an easy thing to do. And he did all of this despite hating third parties in general. I said some unkind things in the early dead chat because I loved my mental image of the role too much and considering his putting to be almost playing against his win con but it wasn't, he won, and managed to never be under much serious pressure.
On the town side there were some crazy swings. The first was Iso bonding to Az as soon as the day start. Tying your vitality battery to the other high vitality role was just bad. Another major one was Wisp draining Cuth and delaying the Vig shot. The craziest swing though was obviously Night 4. So setting the scene there were 10 alive (6s4w) and Cuth had a vig shot he was itching to use. Scum could win that night if Cuth missed his vig shot (or it didn't kill Sloth). They decided to go for the fancy play and to try and win on the spot rather than blocking Cuth with the RB and going into a 9 person Condemn or Lose. And for a second I thought it paid off because Bessie had been doc'd by Tammy to protect her from Cuth's shot, but I'd forgotten the scum team blocked Tammy on top of shooting her.
Anyway I thought the game was a very enjoyable read with several swings in momentum. I hope you all enjoyed it! Thank you so much for playing and thanks again to Osie and DV for helping me get the game ready!
I addressed a lot of the rest of this post elsewhere but the secret agents game was my game as well. I have been obsessed with this design space because of an old Azrael game I read when I was first starting mafia. I found the design amazing and had been trying to do different tweaks to his design as I found it excellent. But I have (finally Ecophagy) come to the conclusion that it's just not as interesting of a design space as I hoped. I think Bur used it really well and it was interesting but overall it just wasn't interesting enough. And I think the empowerment mechanic Az used was more dynamic than my vitality system.
When players agree to a specialty game like this they expect more than just a one shot track as their role.
A thought I just had on improving vitality is that players should have been informed how much the NK did would have helped with the feeling several people have described of needing to hoard vitality. With the drain around it might still have happened but at least a player at 3 vitality might feel freed to use it after a mass claim.
I think the power of the hood chats with Azreals game is that they were sort of "Tacked on". The main power of that game was something else entirely.
The game I'm most fond of with hood chats is Ace Attorney, which was a very unique way of having that mechanic.
I was going to ask if the experiment was over now. It's a shame that you haven't cracked it to your satisfaction, but ultimately the problem is that although chats are fun, they are actually so low value (despite being consistently over-evaluated as +town) that people won't use them - especially not if they cost resources. I think it's no surprise that the Bur used the chats best here because his were free. But free chats have their own problem of taking content away from the thread.
Maybe there's some space in attaching chats to roles - like Track a player and get a chat with them. So the chat doesn't cost anything, but would probably influence your choice of action target. But I don't think there would be enough to build a whole game around that.
I'm not sure I agree - I think people want a cool, cohesive experience. Strong flavour, lots going on, and maybe an additional mechanic to play around with sure. But I think players respect that you can't have a game where every role is uber cool - sometimes you need a one-shot track (or even vanillas!) to glue to game together. The game itself just needs to be cool enough that just being part of the experience is fun.
There were some interesting tricks you could pull, but to make them really central to the gameplay, there need to be abilities that encourage use of that design space, despite the risks.
I did enjoy them here, and the setup was fine. The town lost this based on our play, decisively.
I've been unexcited by chatty games for a WHILE now, yeah.
Thank you for running it grapefruit. I enjoyed the setup and flavor, and now I want to put this series on my to read lost.
Sorry my reads suckedso badly. Worst reads I’ve had in a long time. There were some things that bugged me about scum that I’d see and promptly forget about 10 minutes later, so rip Tammy’s thoughts and reads.
Re: wolves pooling vitality I don't think that was a huge problem on its own, but when looking at the roles it feels like e.g. the Roleblocker was meant to be shot-limited like most of the town roles and allowing the vit thief to steal a vit every night and turn that into a roleblock essentially removes the shot limit at no real opportunity cost
By itself this isn't a problem; as I said on Discord I tend to favor wolf sided night actions because absent extra killing power the "worst" that can happen is the game becomes mountainous. But combined with the extra killing power the vit steal and factional poison gave I think it was a little too much to have a full roleblocker on top, yes
Re: vitality in general, I don't think this design space is exhausted quite yet, but! I think a game like this needs some inbuilt way for players to generate vitality (for example, if you do not take an action at night you gain 1V) and also "if you reach 0V you die" isn't as interesting as designers usually think it is. Instead of doing that just have death effects like normal and the penalty for having 0V is you can't use your abilities
I'd point to a fairly old now but well received example of this type of mechanic in Star Trek MU IV; a handful of roles in that game had a money mechanic and had a weak ability that generated money and one or two stronger abilities that spent it (e.g. +1: motion detector, -2: full track, -3: full watch as an investigative role). It creates a similar amount of tension between saving and expending resources while giving players something to do while they're "charging up".
Re: chat design space, I think making the Skill once per phase and not cost Vitality would have helped; when Skill shots and your role shots are connected to the same resource it feels pretty bad to spend it sending a message when you can save it to try to get a vig shot or another doctor shot (or not die to the vit pinger). This obv. would have required some retooling of roles whose entire purpose was to use the Skill for free, but it would also have resolved the "wolves need to pool vit to use the skill and still have low enough vit to not be bulletproof" which accidentally turns into "oh the wolves can just use the roleblock forever" and gives you more control over which roles actually die to the vit pinger (it seemed obvious to me that you wanted me to be vulnerable to the vit pinger but also able to use the Skill, otherwise you would have given me 3
or 4 vit or 1 vit instead of exactly 2... but maybe I'm mistaken)
I would like to say for the record though, I wouldn't account this game a mechanical failure at all; almost everything was fine, very good even, I don't want my criticism to overshadow the stuff that worked. I just like to take games apart to see what makes them tick and put them back together again lol.
Azrael and Anak's roles were very good, Cuth's role... isn't something I'm as fond of as you are lol but it worked pretty well. My role, Bur's and Tammy's were safe designs but very solid and functional.
99% of the game was great, 8/10 would play again, and I'd also like to thank you for hosting again.
Gg everyone, hope to see you in the next one!
1. If you can't give people fun roles, don't give people roles at all. The goal is to make a fun game.
2. As I said before, mafia has always been able to function with an inspector, doctor, etc. It works just fine.
Roles that cost more to do less make little sense. "Oh no, if we give people powers, they might use them! They might even keep using them night after night! We can't have that!"
If you don't want people using their powers, don't give them powers. Just make a vanilla game.
Verity is among the worst-designed roles I've ever seen. I would have preferred being a vanilla town.
Also, I get that you're in love with the flavor, and I've never read the books, but is turning into a dragon supposed to suck? Is it something you should avoid? Is turning into a dragon supposed to be the worst thing?
Or are you supposed to feel like a badass? "Holy *****, I'm a ******* dragon!"
The latter seems more fun to me.
I agree with number 1 but I don't agree with number 2. I don't think the classic roles are particularly fun. Doc is more or less fine (which is why it was in the game and the most aggressively costed town role) but it would require very specific circumstances for me to include a inspector into a game. If I need hard confirms I think there are much more fun roles to do it with. That said I agree in a few spots I missed making the game fun as the prime directive.
The latter is more fun but in this case transforming into a dragon is something that does suck. Like a lot. Like so much that if you were raised Catholic you can't help but see parallels to the passion. As for the role itself I definitely missed on the vitality going down, which is the biggest miss of the game in general. Outside of that I think the role is okay. Except I should have lifted the posting restriction in the last 48 hours of a game day.
The biggest problem aside from Vit is that Verity's role has zero utility until you know the roles of other people. On this site, mass claims don't generally happen before day 3. So the role is useless before day 3, pretty much. And then it's useless afterward.
I think the neighborizer thing is a dry well. Either make masons or find a more useful mechanic to experiment with would be my advice. Or just let everyone talk during night, just not vote.
It was a moment when I had to sub out because I could not be active at all due to RL reasons. I apologise for this, am an not doing it often.
Thank you Grapefruit for running the game. The flavor and roles were awesome! I think the balance was ok, it seams scum-sided in retrospect, but if town had lynched mafia early, and mafia had targeted players with too much vitality to kill, perhaps the game would have appeared town sided. I do think that you overestimated the value of neighbor chat for town, more so because wasn’t skill chats one way only? I only had skill with Bur who could have a two way chat. I think the chat mechanics and cost were fine, just that they weren’t of much real value to town. On my home site we had third-party roles in most of our games, so I generally like them.
Thanks to everyone for making me feel welcome on this site, especially Osie for inviting me and Silvercrys who was the first to welcome me, and to my awesome scum partners. My dog sends a special shout out to Sloth and Chandler, his new buddies.. I like this community and would like to play again with you.
Playdate time!