I really just want Tom to flip scum and not have to figure out anything else, even though I'm having a pretty hard time believing that Cantrip, as scum, put 2 of his scumbuddies into a 3 person chat. It is just bafflingly illogical.
RE1031, Cyan, Wuffles_II and Rhand all turned to Tomsloger and said “You must be a cultist.” Tomsloger pointed to all other members spouting off reasons why someone else must be a cultist instead. Eventually ending up arguing that Wuffles_II must have tricked the town with the potion of truth. Unfortunately for him the town didn't buy his arguments and Tomsloger found himself facing the noose after the town very methodically and painfully decided what the best options for distributing their gear was before the next night. After they had formulated a plan, they strung Tomsloger up and then searched his person. To their relief they discovered that he did indeed have occult items on him and everything pointed to him being a cultist member. It took a few more days for all of the monsters roaming the streets to be dealt with; but no more seemed to appear anymore. The town of Arkham was safe at least for now from the threats of the Elder Gods.
Tomsloger has been lynched they were Charlie Kane, the Mafia Banker — Yibb-Tstll.
Charlie Kane, the Mafia Banker — Yibb-Tstll.
Charlie Kane promised the people of Arkham a safer future. He made a lot of promises — lower taxes, better schools, less crime. It was part of the job, after all. He had failed and was promptly run out of office. He went back to his old job as a banker. He would exact his revenge. When he was approached by these cultists, he saw an opportunity. "Let the world burn," he thought. He had tried to help them, and what had they done for him? Charlie smiled to himself, it was only a matter of time.
Abilities
Any-Time Action — Embezzlement
Once per game, you may steal 2 Silver from a dead player. That player's Will will only show 1 Silver missing.
Once per game, you may steal 1 Gold from a dead player. That player's Will will not change.
Night Action — Let Them Burn
Once per game, when performing the Nightkill, you may destroy your target's Will.
Items
Book of Anubis
Passive — Whenever a player dies, if you have less than 4 Sanity, gain 1 Sanity.
Starting Gold: 2 Starting Sanity: -2
Auction Number: 31
Cyan, Wuffles_II,Rhand, RE1031 Have fulfilled their win conditions by lynching the last threat to the town.
The Town has won
Cyan Michael - McGlen, the Town Gunslinger.
Michael McGlen, the Town Gunslinger.
As a soldier in the O'Bannion gang, Michael didn't really believe in all this voodoo mumbo jumbo around town. Or at least, he didn't until the night of the Foreman job, when he saw Fast Louie Farrell pulled screaming into the river by a scaly green creature. As they say, seeing is believing and Michael is starting to believe.
Now, he has gathered his belongings together in the room that he rents at Ma's Boarding House. Louie was a friend of his, and he won't rest until he finds out what's happening in this town and avenges his buddy...
Abilities
Passive — Fast Fingers
Can use two items at night.
Passive — Crime does pay
Can choose gold or item when you kill a player and take it from their dead corpse.
Items
Revolver
Night Action — Each nonconsecutive night, you may target a player. That player dies from being shot. If a player other than the gunslinger acquires the revolver, then it has one shot. Can't be sold or traded. If this item's owner is lynched, this item is confiscated.
Marie Lambeau always had a voice to die for. People called her "the Smoky Velvet." They said she was born to sing jazz, that she had the magic touch — and maybe they were right. Once, Marie heard of a man who could make the dead dance when he played his trumpet. She never could do that — her voice wasn't magic that way. But when people hear it, they like it, and they like her, and that suits her just fine.
Marie's grande-mere just passed away. Why the old dame moved from New Orleans to Arkham, Marie never knew. Anyway, she never paid much attention to the stories people told about the old woman. She just figured they were jealous. But now, she's sitting in Ma's Boarding House holding her grandmother's knife, and she can hear it singing with a voice like smokey velvet...
Abilities
Ability — Performer
Each night phase, you may target a player and know roughly how much money they have. (Within +1 or -1 Silver)
Items
Pocket Watch
Night Action — Target a living player. See who has targeted them this game. You lose 3 Sanity.
Tommy Muldoon wasn't sure what was going on in this crazy city. He'd no sooner graduated from the Police Academy in Boston than he'd been loaned out to the Arkham Sheriff's department. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that some of the stuff going on in Arkham was right out of a bad horror novel. Weird creatures in the woods, people found turned inside out, and worse.
Abilities
Night Action — Rookie Interview
Each odd night phase, you may have target player gain 1 sanity. Discover that player's alignment. If this ability targets a mafia player, you lose 1 sanity.
Passive — Rookie
Cannot use items that cost Sanity to use.
As a traveling salesman, Bob is always on the go. But yesterday, he saw something that made him decide to stay in Arkham and miss his train. While he was in the auction house selling his wares, a robed man came in and bought several items, paying with old gold coins. Astounded, Bob turned to the auctioneer for an explanation, but the man just ignored his questions, simply saying, "That happens, sometimes."
Now, Bob isn't leaving until he figures out where those gold coins came from. If he plays his cards right, maybe this will be the big score. Maybe he'll finally be able to retire and buy that boat he's had his eye on and spend the rest of his days fishing in a tropical paradise. Then again, maybe Bob will finally come to see that all that glitters is not gold.
Due to working as an auctioneer you know that TheRealStinkyJoeTerry is town and that their bid number is 32.
Abilities
Any-Time Action — Get Rich
Once per game, you may siphon 1/3 of money used in all auctions today, rounded down to the nearest silver, that would go to the auction house.
Starting Gold: 1 Starting Silver: 2 Starting Sanity: -1 (From handling all the objects)
Most of my, uhm, ramblings and such are in the spectator chat.
My biggest regret is not trying to force my town reads on Grape and RE through the Heist PoE to narrow it down further but, we didn't really need it I guess.
Also for not living long enough to shoot tom, but, cest la vie. I probably would have been lynched if I'd actually managed to kill anyone, so there's that I suppose.
Some of this game was really hard to balance. I wasn't sure how to gauge player spending for example. There was a real worry that the game would just run out of money. However, the players used their money very conservatively, and it didn't need any help. Osie and I had decided that if the game needed more cash we would auction off “Treasure boxes” that had random amounts of money in them. However this was never used, because it was never needed. I overall liked how the auction house played out and feel there were not many kinks in how that worked. However, I should have had one or two mafia extra auction accounts that they could assign to their members each night. Not having this was problematic. I wanted to largely keep the auction house pure, however in the current form it felt as though it was harder for the mafia to acquire and use items against the town than it should have been.
Game balance wise we had too many protections flying around. This was a remnant of the original design that had and SK in the game with 4 mafia that had more killing power than this current version. After seeing the game play out I would have removed the bodyguard, changed the bandages to something else, and limited the game to one elder sign removing the one that started in the game(Even defanging the mafia seemed like too much when coupled with the rest). I would also have limited the cop more. Possibly an even night cop would have been better for the game or a parity even night cop might have even been better. The doctor in the game was never meant to be as strong as they were, the day use of their healing was supposed to make the doctor harder to use. However this let it sneak through a lot of things that would have messed with the doctor. I'm not certain it needed to be changed, but this did slip through my notice at least. I think Silver's role was decently bastard I would have reworked that role a little. I also should have made Last's RB a sanity cost to use instead of it confirming if it did or didn't block anything.
If I was going to retool the mafia, I wouldn't change much. I'd make the changes to the auction house for them. Shadow's role probably needed some slight love along with Proph's. I overall feel like the mafia was very strong, it had a lot of utility. It got hurt by having three players lurk. One of those players lost a large chunk of money from the mafia due to not having any will setup. I might also make it so that the mafia could also pass a little bit of things in secret when they die. The mafia also had a player claim vanilla, for god knows what reason, then not even ask about the item they were fake claiming to have used and get caught. They might have still been able to wriggle out, but they didn't even try.
I think the mafia also messed up by not claiming night 1 actions. It seemed that anyone claiming a night one action was cleared in the towns eye. The mafia didn't even attempt to make claims other than Tom. However, I think Dota's role should have allowed some of the mafia to still perform an action when the had a break in.
If I was going to change one thing I wouldn't have said the exact number of items stolen from the auction house. Originally it was only going to allow the mafia to take any of the day 3 items, but then I decided to change that towards the end. I thought this would be a good compromise. However I think it did more harm than good. I think simply saying there was a break in and letting the town piece things together to be a better solution than what I did. My mistake was I viewed this as public knowledge, and didn't feel like wasting peoples time for them to figure this out. This was the wrong approach, and making the town spend time on this would have been better.
I felt like most of the items were fine. I'd likely delete the IC maker from the game since that felt too good with a cop also being in the game. I think the largest problem was there was just too much going on with items. First I limited them with Sanity costs, then with charges, then with cycle cool downs. I should have stayed with the sanity costs and cycle cool downs at most. The Mark of Cthulhu was way too powerful as well and we almost nuked that item after we saw its first use. With the vast amount of items in the game there were bound to be some things that slipped through.
Changing the amount of healing for sanity in the game probably would have fixed a lot of these issues. Simply removing a few of the healing items in the store and possibly increasing the cost of a few items would have lead to a better balance.
This specifically matters, with the snowball effect that the items had. By the end of day 2 there were two hard town confirmed players. Rhand and Wuffles. This made the game snowball with everyone giving their items to both of these players and stacking the items on them(Well mostly Wuffles). I'm uncertain what the best move to deal with this would be. Possibly an actual limit to the upper end of items players could have had, giving the mafia tools to punish such a strategy. I think at the bare minimum limiting a player to only being able to win two auctions on any given day would have been best here, on top of removing the IC and increasing costs of items(Which would have forced people to spread items out more).
The longer this game went on the harder it was to monitor. I'd personally like to figure out a way to have interesting mechanics such as this without so much to monitor. Keeping items, gold, sanity and ability use straight was just a nightmare. Player deaths were the best thing to happen since it meant less to monitor.
I think at the end of the day some of the problems of this game wouldn't have been fixed with any time given, but some of this was due to having to rush due to Meg's game not being ready. I thought I had another 4-6 months at the time and was slowly working on the game, Osie and I pushed hard to get the game done in time and at the speed that we did. Osie really did a lot of work this game and even though I'm still made about the debacle that was Day 5, I can't deny how much help he put into this game for launch or helped in running the game from the back end. I really do feel that if we had made this push earlier and then come back and looked at the game again after two weeks some of the problems would have become apparent. That being said I'm not upset about how the game played out, I just think that it could have been better.
Town MVP is a hard choice. KazinArchon gets honorable mention, for the great plays he made early, however when one is cut down as soon as he was its hard to get MVP. Silver also gets honorable mention for just how far down the rabbit hole he was willing to go to understand game mechanics.
To me its down between Rhand and Cyan. Cyan gut shot DotA night one and then played very well throughout the rest of the game. Rhand copped Shadow night one, then spent a cop on Cyan, and then attempted to correctly Cop Tom but failed due to being blocked.
Rhand gets MVP. Rhands game sense was incredibly good this game and all of the cops seemed to be right on the money.
The scum MVP it isn't even a question. Its Tom. Tom played fabulously this game, I think if he had even moderate support from his team this game would have been a lot closer and not felt like the run away it turned into.
Man I really thought I'd get MVP this time. Ah well. Maybe if I'd just trusted my instincts last night and shot Tom(but then maybe I'd just have been blocked somehow as well). Good job Rhand.
Sorry for being so high strung about this game, DV. You took on something incredibly ambitious here, and were exceedingly patient about it. It was a very interesting setup. I just get frustrated when I can't figure things out, and that was hugely exacerbated by the fact that the very design of the game was 'can't figure things out'. I honestly don't feel like that is a good way to design mafia games. The whole point of the game is to work ***** out and compare people's behaviors to their claimed actions and so on. That was basically impossible this game.
The setup mostly just seemed really swingy. DOTA dying N1 was an incredible boon to the town, and the information that we gained from his flip could have been exceedingly damaging to us if he'd stuck around. Plus then Shadow got caught at literally the same time. From an outside perspective, it probably seemed like we just had this locked down and dragged it out for nothing. But from the perspective of being a town player in the game, the game state literally never felt comfortable. I think that if things had gone even a little differently early in the game, or DOTA hadn't just been the most obvious scum to ever scum, this could have easily been a bloodbath for the scum team. I don't like swingy games in general, but that's a personal preference. I still recognize the insane amount of time and effort you put into this setup, DV, and will always have a great appreciation for that.
I wrote an end of game post, but I was kinda irritated about how Day 5 went when I wrote it. So I probably wasn't very nice. Oh well. Here's that post with that caveat:
Hi everyone,
Osie here. Just sharing some thoughts now that the game is over.
The Beginning
When I approached D_V to be a reviewer/comod in September 2017, I figured "I don't know D_V very well (we'd had a rocky relationship in mafia games), but I love the board game Arkham Horror and the Lovecraft Mythos, and certainly would be down to help out."
We spent about half a year taking the game from partial ideas that were rough around the edges to a fantastic behemoth of a creation. This was quite fun, despite us not agreeing on a lot. But we hashed it out. As usual when I'm reviewing, I spent a decent portion of the time spelling and grammar editing the text, lowering complexity creep, and saying "No, we really shouldn't have this role that forces the mod to outright lie to or mislead the players."
Back in January, there was still a Godfather ability on the Archaeologist, an element for which I was quick to express my disdain. It wasn't until a while later that I started using and encouraging the suggestion from a MafiaScum player to just tell people that their role might not receive or might lead to false results. Basically, tell the Godfather that there's an Alignment Cop, and tell the Alignment Cop that there's a Godfather. In designing another game for another site, I went with:
It doesn't say exactly what the other players' roles are, but it reveals that false results exist. I'm not lying to the player if I say that their results are: "Shadowlancerx is town," when Shadow is a Godfather, if they know that their results have the potential to be false.
We put each category of game elements into a different location, something which carried over into the game and made remembering every game element much less simple; there was no single excel document to organize everything, as one of the players asked me about. If I could have gone back and done that differently, I would have done so, because keeping track of everything better would have made everything run more smoothly (and probably allowed us to fix another handful of balance issues).
Throughout this time, I was interacting with D_V a lot more. And somewhat practicing ways to try to calm him down here and there and look at situations objectively, not even just with Arkham itself. D_V is a skilled Mafia player, but his temper gets in the way of interactions with people, as it does for many of us. So trying to push him towards a reasonable middle ground when he was riled up about something happened somewhat often. But when he took a step back and looked at things more objectively, it was almost always for the best; he could see the sense in comments like:
But I liked the selection of flavor and mechanics that we had. The Wills, the Auction House, the Elder Gods… And the issues that might come up would be small and probably easily handled, no?
Ecophagy's Qualms
Ecophagy, in Spec Chat in April, said that 14-5 Town-Scum felt like too many Scum.
But Town had more tools available to them than Scum, responded D_V, with myself behind this as a reasonable thought.
As Tom said later:
Ecophagy countered D_V's response with:
and
I figured (and I'm guessing D_V was of a similar thought) that it would work itself out. Besides, the game had started. What were we to do? Modkill a scum player for no reason? That would be ridiculous! And this brings us to Togs, DotA, and Cantrip/Gemma.
Inactivity
Togs and Dota's slots were near inactive, except that they were posting in other threads. And Cantrip's slot was in jeopardy at the same time. If it was just Togs, that would be one thing. Togs being replaced or modkilled for inactivity would have surprised nobody. But having 2 scum and a town inactive was trouble. Thankfully, they eventually started playing again. But we were so close to modkilling 1 scum and 1 town and looking for a replacement for the third.
The game moved on and school got very busy for me. I was barely involved outside of giving advice here and there on small issues. When we were considering another replacement, I joked that I could be removed from the spec chat and any google docs and replace in because of how little I remembered about the game.
Day Five Start
Atogaholic (Togs) was running a Gambling-themed Mafia game on MyAnimeList which ended 5/22/18. Togs was busy at the time of the end of the phase, leading to me stepping in as a moderator and ending the game with the last mafia being lynched. Togs' regular disappearances had become a running joke at this point, to the degree that Bur changed his own game's flavor (due to Togs not being around to make the flavor) from "Musical Mafia" to "Disappearance of Togs Mafia." That game is still going on over on MyAnimeList, though it is in hiatus as the site itself is currently down for maintenance.
So when D_V delayed his end of day by 24 hours and then wasn't around, and I was free given that it was the weekend, I figured "Let's do this again!" and waded into the massive pile of information that was this game. After maybe an hour and a half of organizing actions and bouncing between ten role PMs, four Discord Channels, and two Google Docs, I finally had an organized list of all the actions and their results. So I sent things out, figuring that I had checked everything in a list and there were no issues (not having absolutely confirmed that all the roles and items worked as I thought they did). I opened up the threads and got Bur to change their titles to Day 5 and figured all was well.
Then flavor gaming started to happen. "Okay, I didn't put enough time into the flavor. I'll update that with a reminder to not flavor game." And then I noticed the game was paused by D_V. And, oh boy, D_V was pissed. Okay, what's going on?
There was a rapid back-and-forth both in PM and in Spec Chat. All in one place, what happened differently from D_V's intentions:
It turned out later that 4A was, in fact, false. Lastwhisper had submitted his changes of action well before the phase change, and Curse was just messing things up for everyone.
(That's 1:42 PM EST when I recorded Lastwhisper's final target, with a phase change time of 3 PM EST.)
But an abridged narration of spec chat:
DV and I each post what happened. My post includes calm recommendations for fixes.
If an item's ability checks if a player is targeted or not that night, then that ability shouldn't target that player, or should only check if that player is targeted by another player. Also, if an item can affect hidden players, then it does not target. Strongmanning an item doesn't even excuse this, as hidden players are generally considered to not be inside the game for the purposes of targeting.
I'm not sure if D_V read any of my suggestions or even some of Silver's comments given that he was, quite rightfully, very mad about the errors. But either way we got #5782:
While I'm not one to talk about giving out free information, though mine was given out in good faith, in my opinion the thread as a whole should absolutely not have been given the player-specific information about Tom and RE. I also wholeheartedly consider it bastard modding to not inform an informative role if they are redirected or to not explicitly inform a player either whether or not their ability did something, or that they don't know. So I'm absolutely in agreement with most of these two posts from Cyan:
Sure enough, Tom, RE, and Wuffles, the three most affected players, openly stated they wanted the game to continue:
So in the end…
I'm sorry that I messed up the game state. I'm sorry that I didn't let Night Four continue until D_V was ready to start Day Five. And I'm sorry that I didn't catch all of the items that didn't work ideally before they caused problems. I hope that despite actions on my part and D_V's, that overall players enjoyed this game. It was fun to work on and I believe that the intention of both myself and D_V was that it be fun to play, even if we don't always agree on what that means.
The Ward of Cthulhu
The original wording of Ward of Cthulhu was
30 Ward of Cthullu
Any-time Action — Pay 2 sanity. Target player, anyone who targets that player will lose one sanity and will be sent into the otherworld for the rest of that phase.
Can only be used once per cycle.
We realized in spec chat at the beginning of Day 6 just how busted this item was. Every night reflexive commuter for 2 sanity? Seems legit.
We talked about it for a while and ended up on non-consecutive cycle usage as the fairest solution. Even then, the item was still busted. But it didn't matter anyways. Making it 1-shot was too much.
Yeah let's talk about that a bit more. Allowing things like redirection to exist and not informing people that they got redirected is nonsense. Like..full stop. This is not information that you can just hide from a playerbase; the advantage that it gives to those that know what happened is tremendous and far too difficult to overcome. This is just not a thing that should happen. When people use abilities, they should either A)know the results of them or B)understand if they were interfered with. That's it.
And some of the items were just silly. It's easy to say 'the Eyes would be too powerful if they told you if they absorbed an ability'. But how powerful is that, really? You don't know what ability. You just know that they did something. Otherwise, it's just a dumb item that you spend 3 Sanity on(which is a considerable amount) to hope that it ever does something. Plus it's hugely diminished by Tom's kill apparently being not stoppable/redirectable/anything in any way. If you want to include items in a game(which I think is great, I love when games have extra things like this..Specialties are literally like the only games I play anymore), you have to be crystal clear on what those items do. Hiding this information just gives the scum a benefit that they shouldn't have.
Jesus Christ I got us two extra kills and dota and proph died before being able to use them
All respect to rhand/cyan who were both great but town mvp was [the flavor] and it isn't close.
The free information about the heist (which was a super cool ability but that newspaper article basically ended the game singlehandedly), how people died, etc was absolutely ridiculous.
I've literally never seen town be given this much information in a game and y'all fools were complaining...
Last, rhand, and dawn were already too much info. Add the flavor, the items, re/joe that's enough of this rant
Way too much free info
I have a lot more thoughts and some of them are even things other than berating proph
Later
Think the auction house + will combination is probably inherently broken. Just... 5 new items coming into the game each day and sure some got used up but most just kept accumulating. Maybe if everything was single use?
And did I complain yet about me being unblockable/unredirectable and redirected AND blocked last night?
Honestly I've never been so demoralized as after osi broke everything. I went from having choices who to fake a guilty on to my buddy being the only person that could have performed the nightkill and game over. That and the dawn modkill ended whatever small chance I had left and I knew it
I think the roles themselves were really well done and balanced, items a little much, and the flavor was brutal.
But we still would have had a punchers chance with, like, an *average* team.
Yeah let's talk about that a bit more. Allowing things like redirection to exist and not informing people that they got redirected is nonsense. Like..full stop. This is not information that you can just hide from a playerbase; the advantage that it gives to those that know what happened is tremendous and far too difficult to overcome. This is just not a thing that should happen. When people use abilities, they should either A)know the results of them or B)understand if they were interfered with. That's it.
And some of the items were just silly. It's easy to say 'the Eyes would be too powerful if they told you if they absorbed an ability'. But how powerful is that, really? You don't know what ability. You just know that they did something. Otherwise, it's just a dumb item that you spend 3 Sanity on(which is a considerable amount) to hope that it ever does something. Plus it's hugely diminished by Tom's kill apparently being not stoppable/redirectable/anything in any way. If you want to include items in a game(which I think is great, I love when games have extra things like this..Specialties are literally like the only games I play anymore), you have to be crystal clear on what those items do. Hiding this information just gives the scum a benefit that they shouldn't have.
I actually agree that not telling someone there been redirected sucks. It hurts information roles like tracker.
KoolKoal: Feel free to take this with a grain of salt since self meta isn't particularly helpful, but I think I get scumread mostly for style over substance, but also for a certain lack of substance over style. It's not so much what I AM posting most of the time (though sometimes that can seem bad) but what I'm NOT posting. I've been told I come to non-obvious conclusions a lot, so when I post, quite a bit of the time there's jumps in logic that people can't follow and they think that's scummy. I get that accusation about a lot of questions I ask specifically. People call them "busy work" when the questions are legit etc.
As far as things to ignore, I can't think of anything. I would suggest you focus less on what I'm doing and more on how I'm doing it. That's probably more likely to be accurate. Like I've just said, what I do tends to come off a little weird, but if you look for how I do it, mindset comes into play and maybe you figure out something useful.
The only reason things would have been different if Osi didn't mess up is because DV wanted redirection to just be a non-reveal, which is literally just comical levels of nonsense. In any normal circumstance, people would have submitted their actions, and been informed that they got redirected to someone else, and it would have been worked out.
I can understand being gruff about the Heist, but this is just more of the same point. The full list of AH items should have always been available(and maybe was, I don't remember now), so as soon as X items disappeared at once, it would have been obvious what happened. And you guys had the benefit of us thinking that LW's RB wouldn't stop someone from being on the Heist(because the ability was worded so oddly), even though it would have. If we'd understood that, RE would have been absolutely confirmed town the entire game, instead of only becoming effectively confirmed when Cantrip got lynched and flipped the role that it made the most sense for RE-scum to have.
And like come on. Items just vanished when they were used up, so you guys got to use things and know exactly what happened, while we literally had no idea and just had to surmise that 'some item got used at some point'. The possibilities for second guessing yourself as town in this circumstance are literally endless.
You messed up defending Cantrip, and I think you know it. I guess you felt like you'd have lost out to POE otherwise, and you might have, but you HARD defended Cantrip, and it just only made sense for you to do so if you were scum with him, no matter how much you tried to run the 'I'm just a *****lord' defense for doing so.
And Dawning was never getting lynched after the start of Day 5; it was overwhelmingly obvious that she was being truthful about everything there. Her getting modkilled was the best thing that could POSSIBLY have happened for you there, because I 100% would have shot you last night if there had been even one more town body around.
Thanks for MVP
I’m still reading spec chat, but @Shadow: You were my biggest scumread going into Night, together with Iso. I figured targetting Iso wasn’t going to work because I believed at least the hiding aspect of his claimed role was true, so you were my best shot.
So no, it wasn’t random luck
As a someone who has read through this whole game, this game was a wild and long ride (2nd longest MTGS game ever, only behind Zero Escape Mafia).
While I really liked the flavour and the mechanics (items, auction house etc.), I at times felt this game was drowning in complexity. I really had trouble keeping up with all the items, who had what, what the items did on top of all other things happening.
Also, I really felt that the auction-mechanics, while really nice, needed some fixing. First of all, having to try to guess what all the biddable items do (unless you were SJT, who had his day ability to help him) can be bit hard, especially if you are not familiar with the flavour and so can be a bit turn-off. Then, the whole will system, which ensured that more and more items were brought to game every day, but none of them really ever left the game (unless it was x-shot item that used all its shots) and having to publicly either will them or have town decide who gets them made things really hard for mafia. It punishes mafia every time they lose a member as town gets all of their stuff unless mafia publicly donates their stuff to a buddy, which then makes that buddy look bad. And on top of all, mafia shooting someone having trouble some items is not a solution at all, it'll just move all the items and abilities from one player to second.
Then, the information given to players. While I learned in ZE that giving too much information to players is bad, not giving anything to players is also bad. I usually give out to my players one of the following replies: Your ability has failed / You have successfully used your ability on X / You have successfully used your ability on Y instead of the original target.
This is to make sure weird interactions don't accidentally turn the game into a huge flaming pile of bastard mafia (like, mafia redirecting cop from scum to town and just telling town cop "your target is town" without informing them about their target getting changed).
Also, lastly, I was bit sad to see DBS getting modkilled, since 1) it made town's life even more easier 2) I wanted to replace into that slot
Still, overall, huge thanks for osie and DV for this whole game. Even though it had some problems, I still see that you put tons of effort into this game and it shows. I'm really eager to see what kind of game your guys will be bring us next (together or separate).
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Prophylaxis »
Also modgaming Bur setups is kind of treading down a dark path
And yeah our items got expended so you didn't know what was going on (though... really? Joe got vanillized publicly and mine is the only one that did literally anything else all game and it didn't even stop me from getting roleblocked which it's purpose)
But that's because we got the few expendable items and town got all the ones that stayed around forever lol
I'm not, like, complaining a huge amount about this setup it was still winnable if the cantrip and dota slots had played and proph hadn't frankly embarrassed himself
But it was pretty clearly townsided with the items and info
Thanks for MVP
I’m still reading spec chat, but @Shadow: You were my biggest scumread going into Night, together with Iso. I figured targetting Iso wasn’t going to work because I believed at least the hiding aspect of his claimed role was true, so you were my best shot.
So no, it wasn’t random luck
This is funny to me, in that Iso was the other person I was considering vigging N1 heh. Ultimately though I just couldn't get over how really, really obviously scum DOTA was. Like his vote on Vezok was just...unreal bad.
I usually give out to my players one of the following replies: Your ability has failed / You have successfully used your ability on X / You have successfully used your ability on Y instead of the original target.
This is always how it should be. Always. I cannot think of a circumstance where it should be any other way. If you don't want to confirm the existence of an RB by saying 'you got roleblocked', that's fine. But if someone's ability fails, they should know. If it doesn't, they should know. If they got redirected, they should ABSOLUTELY know.
@Tom: But the expendable items were far more powerful. You guys literally got to make a person Vanilla, and even THAT was not information that was going to be provided to them until they actually tried to do something. This kind of hidden information is incredibly powerful, it just happened that you had to use it on a person that was going to figure it out not only immediately, but during the day as well. Mafia is literally a game of information. You are wildly downplaying how powerful it is to keep this information from only the town.
I do agree about Wills though. Town should have been able to Will one item to someone else; at most. We shouldn't have just been able to stockpile items constantly, that's too much.
I'm sorry that I had to replace out, especially since that seems to have cost us the game. Something happened IRL and I had to stop everything in my life including work for a little over a week to take care of it and there was no chance I could play or do anything in the game for that period. I'm sorry for my activity issues as well, work suddenly became really really hectic right after I replaced in and it wasn't anything I could foresee at the time. It's hard to find time for anything else while working 140 hour weeks, and when I did have little slivers of time, my priorities were with my partner and immediate things of concern IRL, then the game second. I also didn't anticipate how insanely busy/active the game would be.
I didn't really follow the game, but congrats town on the win, you were all super engaged and proactive and it was really nice to see people working so hard to solve a game together.
Kudos to DV for coming up with such a creative and complex setup. I think the will system was a little too townsided, since mafia couldn't really pass on items to each other without basically risking outing themselves (the only reason it partially worked this game is because tom/shadow wifom stuff). Items were always going to pool into towns hands, I think. And because item usage can be clearing for town (and never really for mafia), on top of the utility of the items themselves, it's a lot to overcome for mafia. More KP for mafia may have helped to deal with that, maybe.
There were also too many clears for town, I think. A generic rule I follow is that town should never have more clears than there are mafia. Town had over 5 clears, this game. I don't know exactly how many clears there were, but there were a lot, even if some of them weren't hard clears. I think the way that we used my role came the closest to matching that kind of clearing power, but that required a lot of creativity and effort, whereas town only had to use their items as they were given and be transparent about that, if that makes sense. It's hard to balance such a crazy setup like this, though.
Town definitely shouldn't have been told the number of mafia that went on the heist when mafia had no idea that it was a traceable action. It was also just overpowered. Town did a really good job of solving in that PoE, too, so credit to them.
Also super fun game I got busy and disheartened towards the end and lost my grasp mechanically but I had a blast figuring out what to do early on
I loved nailing the ah# read on Joe to steal the Tommy gun, even though we didn't get to use it. I loved coming up with completely believable fake claims for me, cantrip, AND proph (seriously I gave him a good claim AND told him cyan probably targeted himself no idea why he thought he knew better)
Also super fun game I got busy and disheartened towards the end and lost my grasp mechanically but I had a blast figuring out what to do early on
I loved nailing the ah# read on Joe to steal the Tommy gun, even though we didn't get to use it. I loved coming up with completely believable fake claims for me, cantrip, AND proph (seriously I gave him a good claim AND told him cyan probably targeted himself no idea why he thought he knew better)
Yeah that was legit impressive. If only we hadn't lost the gun straight away (boo wills).
@Tom: But the expendable items were far more powerful. You guys literally got to make a person Vanilla, and even THAT was not information that was going to be provided to them until they actually tried to do something. This kind of hidden information is incredibly powerful, it just happened that you had to use it on a person that was going to figure it out not only immediately, but during the day as well. Mafia is literally a game of information. You are wildly downplaying how powerful it is to keep this information from only the town.
I do agree about Wills though. Town should have been able to Will one item to someone else; at most. We shouldn't have just been able to stockpile items constantly, that's too much.
that's literally one piece of info
And it had yet more flavor accompanying it, and was pretty obviously from the mafia like
I think you might be thinking there's other examples of this and there's just not. Vanillizing is good, obviously. But shadow not flipping with it is a super tiny deal
You did all the things that I would normally do for my mafia team. You kept us organized and informed, you coordinated stuff, you did the legwork for stuff like hunting down the AH numbers, you put in tons of time and care into the game and were always chill about it, yeah, you were good for morale.
Also, Cyan, or whomever it was that scumread my slot for not keeping its story straight about our actions (this was the only part of the game that I read after replacing out), there was actually no discrepancy. You misunderstood me and thought that I said I used it at night. I then corrected you and said that it was a day action. Caught for wrong reasons >:[
Have you really been letting us blabber on about Gemma's neighborizer when she literally created one for you and Proph? Do you have actual insight into extra Proph stuff that you've been holding out on? Come on man.
This doesn't seem like something that most scum would think to make up(the pay a gold to check up part), and the benefit of knowing people are 'in the same hood' seems far too narrow for a scum ability(like it's literally only useful with Iso's role as far as we know right now). I think this puts Gemma squarely into town territory.
Also, Gemma, does this mean that you created the link between Tom and Proph N1? Why did you choose those 2 players?
Yeah and n2 as well. Or day 2 rather, is a day action and I can do it at any point in the dayohase I think. I should double check my role PM when I get home but I think that's how it works. They were my only real town reads and they're also the only people here I actually know, Proph less so then tom. I feel a little bit stupid using the gold thing now that I have the result but oh well. I thought I was probably going to die so it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Had a great time
Think the setup was really ambitious and cool just a bit stacked against mafia
Think town played well, and I'm pretty happy with what I put in
Also super fun game I got busy and disheartened towards the end and lost my grasp mechanically but I had a blast figuring out what to do early on
I loved nailing the ah# read on Joe to steal the Tommy gun, even though we didn't get to use it. I loved coming up with completely believable fake claims for me, cantrip, AND proph (seriously I gave him a good claim AND told him cyan probably targeted himself no idea why he thought he knew better)
What did you come up with for him? Didn't see it anywhere.
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Quote from Prophylaxis »
Also modgaming Bur setups is kind of treading down a dark path
I'm still deciding whether to use my last action to sell the Cross or to shoot someone. I think shooting someone here could be dangerous; who knows what the last scum can do. At the same time, if Rhand or Wuffles is somehow scum, they're likely just going to win the game, so shooting one of Tom/Grape and just hoping I can convince everyone else to lynch the other tomorrow seems..okay. I suppose I could also convince them to NL, so that we could potentially roll into another night so that I'd gain another shot.
Of course, if Tom is scum and I shoot Grape, that lets Tom 'use' the Pocket Watch and lie about whatever tonight's NK results are. I suppose I could just shoot Tom and take that possibility out of the equation entirely.
Suck it. I was very, very well aware that Tom was highly likely to be scum, I just didn't want to fire when I didn't have to.
And of course I shot Atog. He was fairly scummy, he was in the POE, his role involved the Auction House.
Oh and right. You roleblocked RHAND, arguably the most town confirmed person in the entire game. The game would have just been instantly over if that hadn't happened. You directly assisted the scum. Get over yourself you clown.
And yes, I definitely highly valued my role. Vig is easily the second best town role, behind Cop. 3rd is..who ******* knows, but it's not particularly close. Also, I value myself as a player more than anyone else that was alive and likely town at that point, take that however you will.
Ultimately, you are a stone garbage player and have no business questioning my play, or anyone else', for that matter. You RBed the same person TWICE even though you should have known after the first time that he was 100% clear town, except you couldn't understand your own role PM. I'm honestly glad that I only play like one game per year, because if I signed up to another game with you any time soon, I'd just replace out to save myself the heartache of listening to your nonsense.
Also, Cyan, or whomever it was that scumread my slot for not keeping its story straight about our actions (this was the only part of the game that I read after replacing out), there was actually no discrepancy. You misunderstood me and thought that I said I used it at night. I then corrected you and said that it was a day action. Caught for wrong reasons >:[
It was icing on the cake
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When the point of no return appears, it is already behind you.
I really let the team down, if I'd been more active D1 and dodged the Vig it would have made a world of difference to how the rest of the game played out. Was very surprised to see the mod confirm of the number of items stolen but had I been alive and my role not publicly known it wouldn't have mattered as much. A big part of our loss here rests on my shoulders.
He posted about that in spec chat, he said it was a copy/paste error from Wuffles action but he's not sure how it happened exactly.
You were effectively roleblocked anyway, though, because both of your targets targeted Cyan which sent them to the Otherworlds.
I have some set up thoughts that I'll probably post piecemeal over the next couple days. The TL;DR there is basically that the AH made the game really snowbally in either direction and the wolves probably needed some kind of factional ability to affect the auction house like extra auction numbers or something (we've talked about that pretty extensively in spec chat so I'll probably be repeating a lot of what D_V says there lol).
As far as the Heist goes I think there are really only two ways to "fix" that. Have the names of all the items in the AH known up front instead of waiting until D3 to add some items and leave it to the wolves to figure out that the town can figure out how many items were stolen *and* to the town to actually do that; or obfuscate how many items are in the auction house by removing the lot numbers and randomly deciding a subset of items to be bid on that day instead of voting for items. Since the item names often weren't related to the item's function and the item's actual powers were hidden, this shouldn't really change anything about how items are chosen. It was basically random anyway except the Holy Water bids.
I think it was a misplay to have all of the wolves heist in the first place because it should have been obvious that we could figure out how many items were stolen by checking which lot numbers were missing. But a lot of the wolf roles felt weak when I reviewed the set up so I can't really blame you guys, heh. Most of the raw power was tied up in DoTA's role or was counter play for the frankly silly amount of investigative power in the set up. It would have mattered *less* if DoTA hadn't also died N1 because his flip basically told us that the number of missing items = the number of wolves. Hrm. Actually maybe you could get away with just not doing full role reveals...
I'm a bit flummoxed at my own role, specifically the King in Yellow Screenplay. I know D_V said he would change it already, but, the fact that I would have lost the new abilities after successfully making a kill and that that whole business was hidden is kind of. I would have been upset if myself or Cyan had gotten lynched over, let's just say that. And I never did ask, but presumably my current sanity wouldn't have been affected upon changing back and if I had succeeded at killing someone I would have died to sanity loss anyway.
The Ward of Cthulhu was a busted item that probably shouldn't have made it past review lol. I'm glad it didn't really have a chance to affect the game. My favorite future fix would be to allow the targeting action to go through before sending that person to the Otherworlds, similar to the way the Sign works.
Shadow's tablet was a silly item and probably should have just given the choice between gold, item, and ability cop, if not just done all three at once.
Wolves probably needed to be able to activate abilities and items at the same time. They didn't actually have any night abilities other than the kill, but that alone could narrow the PoE pretty considerably.
Wolf AH fix is to give them dummy numbers they can bid under instead of Cantrip's anonymous bidder ability, I think D_V already said that. The wills were also a bit of a problem, but I'm not sure how to fix that. Either just remove them and items on dead players are removed from the game (opens up a bit of design space to take items from dead players I guess) or allow wolves to pass items without having to use the will system.
Sometimes you can be very unpleasant. Which is frustrating because you are clearly much better at intuitively solving games than I am but your "left handedness" makes you frustrating to play with. Mafia is a social game. It's not just about being right/wrong it's about communication and collaboration. And while you're very good at the solving part you seem to enjoy being intentionally bad at the other parts. So no matter how right you consistently are you're not someone I enjoy playing with right now. Which is a shame because you're on a really hot streak of solving games right now but it's just not worth it.
@Cyan same thing man. You smaahed this game. Were awesome and had awesome reads. And deserve a ton of credit for that. But like maybe don't call people "stone garbage". Wisp talked a lot in the chat about not being great and being confused a lot. And yeah having a player who admits to having a bad game second guess you can be infuriating, but like that doesn't mean his opinion is worthless. I'm not really building to a big point here I just want us to not be horrible to each other. Wisp doesn't bring the keenest insight or the carefulest reading to the game but he tries and he's (usually though not in this specific circumstance) humble.
Anyway I had an absolute blast this game and I'm so happy I managed not be mislyched. I got somethings right (Cantrip being scum and them using the chat as a daychat) and many more wrong (Prop, Vezok, Gemma, and some really bad conspiracies) and enjoyed figuring this all out together. Thanks everyone and especially our mods.
Being different is great. And I'm not trying to tell you to be a conformist or to not be you. I'm just asking you to think about how your actions might impact others Phraze.
When I told you after pirates that I'd taken advantage of being scum and was enjoying trying to mislynch you it hurt you. Knowing the arguments I'd made were disingenuous and specifically targeted at you hurt. Which is completely reasonable. But if you're going to ask me to be a better person and expect me to take you seriously you need to hold yourself to that same standard. And you haven't been. I'm not religious but "do unto other's as you would have other's do unto you" is a genuine bit of wisdom.
1. There was a LOT of frustration in this game, and I hated how this reflects on D_V and Osie. The amount of effort required to make and mod this game was astronomical.
2. DawningBluSky at first I just didn't understand the way you thought, but you became actively unpleasant there toward the endgame, which really bummed me out.
3. Cyan you played a fantastic game, but you kind of gave away the highground there at the end with your comments around wisp.
4. Tom, you played well. Really well. I was totally convinced that you and cantrip were town thanks to the way you manipulated the daychat day 4.
More thoughts when I have more time and icafe credit. GGWP all.
Right, so. If Shadow flips scum, Gemma is definitely town. It amazes me when someone is dead scum and still manages to leak information about other players.
Just a reminder to anyone who ever tried to read me for spew, I know what I’m doing
Also, the chat with Tom/Gemma/proph was because Scum didn’t get day chat after like 1 week of real time.
@cyan: With regards to me Vanillaizing Terry; I sent in my action less than 1 min after DV distributed the tommy gun, so it wasn’t really his fault for waiting around, I was pretty keen on not getting Day killed.
@Rhand: that’s fair, just unfortunate for me that one of the people who actually thought I was scum was also a cop. Great play this game though, you deserve the MVP.
Huge Props to Tom for making this game at least a sport and not a collapse. His replace in was the only thing that made this not stupid. I wish I’d not been copped, but it seems a theme for me.
I’ve talked about balance in the spec chat plenty, and people have brought up stuff here as well, but yeah, great design, but it had some serious inertia problems.
I definitely enjoyed what little of the game I did get to play though
I hope y’all enjoyed my outed wolf trolling, I certainly did.
I did enjoy the outed wolf trolling, though it did get old quickly
My favourite things about this game:
1. The scum not overriding me in the AH for rift of zhar or mark of Cthulhu. Ohh man am I glad I was super serious about stopping those broken ass items from falling into scum hands. Sheeit.
2. Silvercrys. I don't think you should have killed yourself until you'd made a mechanical impact on the game, but your last day contributions actually made me feel real life regret that you weren't going to stay around. #imnotcryingurcrying
3. Getting trolled by osie over my trying to figure out what the hell the elder gods were. I must have sent 10+ messages and no solid answers.
4. D_V's willingness to continue despite bitterness to finish the game after mistakes were made. <3
5. Grape. The hero gotham needed but didn't deserve. IM SORRY I GOT YOU KILLED ACCIDENTALLY FREN I JUST WANTED TO PREVENT AN (APPARENTLY UNDOC-UNREDIRECTABLE) KILL >.<. He kept me filled up and rifting for three days.
6. My utterly mis-guided glee over "fooling" the scum with my philosopher"s stone play in the daychat not realising the scums were all listening in. LOL. I'm good at this game.
7. Buying the truth potion. I'm aware it was the only thing that kept me alive.
8. The pocketwatch. I love that item's design. Super expensive and probably a huge liability for the town, but it felt super powerful to use.
I don't have much to add except to say that the pocket watch is one of the best designed abilities I've ever seen. I'm thinking of ways of introducing it into a normal game without being either too swingy or too broken.
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Derpity derp derp derp.
Anyway, more votes on Tom please.
I hope this is it.
RE1031, Cyan, Wuffles_II and Rhand all turned to Tomsloger and said “You must be a cultist.” Tomsloger pointed to all other members spouting off reasons why someone else must be a cultist instead. Eventually ending up arguing that Wuffles_II must have tricked the town with the potion of truth. Unfortunately for him the town didn't buy his arguments and Tomsloger found himself facing the noose after the town very methodically and painfully decided what the best options for distributing their gear was before the next night. After they had formulated a plan, they strung Tomsloger up and then searched his person. To their relief they discovered that he did indeed have occult items on him and everything pointed to him being a cultist member. It took a few more days for all of the monsters roaming the streets to be dealt with; but no more seemed to appear anymore. The town of Arkham was safe at least for now from the threats of the Elder Gods.
Tomsloger has been lynched they were Charlie Kane, the Mafia Banker — Yibb-Tstll.
Charlie Kane, the Mafia Banker — Yibb-Tstll.
Charlie Kane promised the people of Arkham a safer future. He made a lot of promises — lower taxes, better schools, less crime. It was part of the job, after all. He had failed and was promptly run out of office. He went back to his old job as a banker. He would exact his revenge. When he was approached by these cultists, he saw an opportunity. "Let the world burn," he thought. He had tried to help them, and what had they done for him? Charlie smiled to himself, it was only a matter of time.
Abilities
Any-Time Action — Embezzlement
Once per game, you may steal 2 Silver from a dead player. That player's Will will only show 1 Silver missing.
Once per game, you may steal 1 Gold from a dead player. That player's Will will not change.
Night Action — Let Them Burn
Once per game, when performing the Nightkill, you may destroy your target's Will.
Items
Book of Anubis
Passive — Whenever a player dies, if you have less than 4 Sanity, gain 1 Sanity.
Starting Gold: 2
Starting Sanity: -2
Auction Number: 31
The Town has won
Cyan Michael - McGlen, the Town Gunslinger.
As a soldier in the O'Bannion gang, Michael didn't really believe in all this voodoo mumbo jumbo around town. Or at least, he didn't until the night of the Foreman job, when he saw Fast Louie Farrell pulled screaming into the river by a scaly green creature. As they say, seeing is believing and Michael is starting to believe.
Now, he has gathered his belongings together in the room that he rents at Ma's Boarding House. Louie was a friend of his, and he won't rest until he finds out what's happening in this town and avenges his buddy...
Abilities
Passive — Fast Fingers
Can use two items at night.
Passive — Crime does pay
Can choose gold or item when you kill a player and take it from their dead corpse.
Items
Revolver
Night Action — Each nonconsecutive night, you may target a player. That player dies from being shot. If a player other than the gunslinger acquires the revolver, then it has one shot. Can't be sold or traded. If this item's owner is lynched, this item is confiscated.
Starting Gold: 2
Starting Silver: 2
Starting Sanity: 1
Auction Number: 58
Marie Lambeau always had a voice to die for. People called her "the Smoky Velvet." They said she was born to sing jazz, that she had the magic touch — and maybe they were right. Once, Marie heard of a man who could make the dead dance when he played his trumpet. She never could do that — her voice wasn't magic that way. But when people hear it, they like it, and they like her, and that suits her just fine.
Marie's grande-mere just passed away. Why the old dame moved from New Orleans to Arkham, Marie never knew. Anyway, she never paid much attention to the stories people told about the old woman. She just figured they were jealous. But now, she's sitting in Ma's Boarding House holding her grandmother's knife, and she can hear it singing with a voice like smokey velvet...
Abilities
Ability — Performer
Each night phase, you may target a player and know roughly how much money they have. (Within +1 or -1 Silver)
Items
Pocket Watch
Night Action — Target a living player. See who has targeted them this game. You lose 3 Sanity.
Starting Gold: 1
Starting Silver: 5
Starting Sanity: 1
Auction Number: 15
Tommy Muldoon wasn't sure what was going on in this crazy city. He'd no sooner graduated from the Police Academy in Boston than he'd been loaned out to the Arkham Sheriff's department. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that some of the stuff going on in Arkham was right out of a bad horror novel. Weird creatures in the woods, people found turned inside out, and worse.
Abilities
Night Action — Rookie Interview
Each odd night phase, you may have target player gain 1 sanity. Discover that player's alignment. If this ability targets a mafia player, you lose 1 sanity.
Passive — Rookie
Cannot use items that cost Sanity to use.
Starting Gold: 1
Starting Silver: 3
Starting Sanity: 2
Auction Number: 67
As a traveling salesman, Bob is always on the go. But yesterday, he saw something that made him decide to stay in Arkham and miss his train. While he was in the auction house selling his wares, a robed man came in and bought several items, paying with old gold coins. Astounded, Bob turned to the auctioneer for an explanation, but the man just ignored his questions, simply saying, "That happens, sometimes."
Now, Bob isn't leaving until he figures out where those gold coins came from. If he plays his cards right, maybe this will be the big score. Maybe he'll finally be able to retire and buy that boat he's had his eye on and spend the rest of his days fishing in a tropical paradise. Then again, maybe Bob will finally come to see that all that glitters is not gold.
Due to working as an auctioneer you know that TheRealStinkyJoeTerry is town and that their bid number is 32.
Abilities
Any-Time Action — Get Rich
Once per game, you may siphon 1/3 of money used in all auctions today, rounded down to the nearest silver, that would go to the auction house.
Starting Gold: 1
Starting Silver: 2
Starting Sanity: -1 (From handling all the objects)
Auction Number: 77
Link to discord spectator.
https://discord.gg/QugvrUP
Link to scum chat.
https://discord.gg/Ay3JS2q
Most of my, uhm, ramblings and such are in the spectator chat.
My biggest regret is not trying to force my town reads on Grape and RE through the Heist PoE to narrow it down further but, we didn't really need it I guess.
Also for not living long enough to shoot tom, but, cest la vie. I probably would have been lynched if I'd actually managed to kill anyone, so there's that I suppose.
Thanks (again) D_V and Osie for hosting!
Some of this game was really hard to balance. I wasn't sure how to gauge player spending for example. There was a real worry that the game would just run out of money. However, the players used their money very conservatively, and it didn't need any help. Osie and I had decided that if the game needed more cash we would auction off “Treasure boxes” that had random amounts of money in them. However this was never used, because it was never needed. I overall liked how the auction house played out and feel there were not many kinks in how that worked. However, I should have had one or two mafia extra auction accounts that they could assign to their members each night. Not having this was problematic. I wanted to largely keep the auction house pure, however in the current form it felt as though it was harder for the mafia to acquire and use items against the town than it should have been.
Game balance wise we had too many protections flying around. This was a remnant of the original design that had and SK in the game with 4 mafia that had more killing power than this current version. After seeing the game play out I would have removed the bodyguard, changed the bandages to something else, and limited the game to one elder sign removing the one that started in the game(Even defanging the mafia seemed like too much when coupled with the rest). I would also have limited the cop more. Possibly an even night cop would have been better for the game or a parity even night cop might have even been better. The doctor in the game was never meant to be as strong as they were, the day use of their healing was supposed to make the doctor harder to use. However this let it sneak through a lot of things that would have messed with the doctor. I'm not certain it needed to be changed, but this did slip through my notice at least. I think Silver's role was decently bastard I would have reworked that role a little. I also should have made Last's RB a sanity cost to use instead of it confirming if it did or didn't block anything.
If I was going to retool the mafia, I wouldn't change much. I'd make the changes to the auction house for them. Shadow's role probably needed some slight love along with Proph's. I overall feel like the mafia was very strong, it had a lot of utility. It got hurt by having three players lurk. One of those players lost a large chunk of money from the mafia due to not having any will setup. I might also make it so that the mafia could also pass a little bit of things in secret when they die. The mafia also had a player claim vanilla, for god knows what reason, then not even ask about the item they were fake claiming to have used and get caught. They might have still been able to wriggle out, but they didn't even try.
I think the mafia also messed up by not claiming night 1 actions. It seemed that anyone claiming a night one action was cleared in the towns eye. The mafia didn't even attempt to make claims other than Tom. However, I think Dota's role should have allowed some of the mafia to still perform an action when the had a break in.
If I was going to change one thing I wouldn't have said the exact number of items stolen from the auction house. Originally it was only going to allow the mafia to take any of the day 3 items, but then I decided to change that towards the end. I thought this would be a good compromise. However I think it did more harm than good. I think simply saying there was a break in and letting the town piece things together to be a better solution than what I did. My mistake was I viewed this as public knowledge, and didn't feel like wasting peoples time for them to figure this out. This was the wrong approach, and making the town spend time on this would have been better.
I felt like most of the items were fine. I'd likely delete the IC maker from the game since that felt too good with a cop also being in the game. I think the largest problem was there was just too much going on with items. First I limited them with Sanity costs, then with charges, then with cycle cool downs. I should have stayed with the sanity costs and cycle cool downs at most. The Mark of Cthulhu was way too powerful as well and we almost nuked that item after we saw its first use. With the vast amount of items in the game there were bound to be some things that slipped through.
Changing the amount of healing for sanity in the game probably would have fixed a lot of these issues. Simply removing a few of the healing items in the store and possibly increasing the cost of a few items would have lead to a better balance.
This specifically matters, with the snowball effect that the items had. By the end of day 2 there were two hard town confirmed players. Rhand and Wuffles. This made the game snowball with everyone giving their items to both of these players and stacking the items on them(Well mostly Wuffles). I'm uncertain what the best move to deal with this would be. Possibly an actual limit to the upper end of items players could have had, giving the mafia tools to punish such a strategy. I think at the bare minimum limiting a player to only being able to win two auctions on any given day would have been best here, on top of removing the IC and increasing costs of items(Which would have forced people to spread items out more).
The longer this game went on the harder it was to monitor. I'd personally like to figure out a way to have interesting mechanics such as this without so much to monitor. Keeping items, gold, sanity and ability use straight was just a nightmare. Player deaths were the best thing to happen since it meant less to monitor.
I think at the end of the day some of the problems of this game wouldn't have been fixed with any time given, but some of this was due to having to rush due to Meg's game not being ready. I thought I had another 4-6 months at the time and was slowly working on the game, Osie and I pushed hard to get the game done in time and at the speed that we did. Osie really did a lot of work this game and even though I'm still made about the debacle that was Day 5, I can't deny how much help he put into this game for launch or helped in running the game from the back end. I really do feel that if we had made this push earlier and then come back and looked at the game again after two weeks some of the problems would have become apparent. That being said I'm not upset about how the game played out, I just think that it could have been better.
Town MVP is a hard choice. KazinArchon gets honorable mention, for the great plays he made early, however when one is cut down as soon as he was its hard to get MVP. Silver also gets honorable mention for just how far down the rabbit hole he was willing to go to understand game mechanics.
To me its down between Rhand and Cyan. Cyan gut shot DotA night one and then played very well throughout the rest of the game. Rhand copped Shadow night one, then spent a cop on Cyan, and then attempted to correctly Cop Tom but failed due to being blocked.
Rhand gets MVP. Rhands game sense was incredibly good this game and all of the cops seemed to be right on the money.
The scum MVP it isn't even a question. Its Tom. Tom played fabulously this game, I think if he had even moderate support from his team this game would have been a lot closer and not felt like the run away it turned into.
Sorry for being so high strung about this game, DV. You took on something incredibly ambitious here, and were exceedingly patient about it. It was a very interesting setup. I just get frustrated when I can't figure things out, and that was hugely exacerbated by the fact that the very design of the game was 'can't figure things out'. I honestly don't feel like that is a good way to design mafia games. The whole point of the game is to work ***** out and compare people's behaviors to their claimed actions and so on. That was basically impossible this game.
The setup mostly just seemed really swingy. DOTA dying N1 was an incredible boon to the town, and the information that we gained from his flip could have been exceedingly damaging to us if he'd stuck around. Plus then Shadow got caught at literally the same time. From an outside perspective, it probably seemed like we just had this locked down and dragged it out for nothing. But from the perspective of being a town player in the game, the game state literally never felt comfortable. I think that if things had gone even a little differently early in the game, or DOTA hadn't just been the most obvious scum to ever scum, this could have easily been a bloodbath for the scum team. I don't like swingy games in general, but that's a personal preference. I still recognize the insane amount of time and effort you put into this setup, DV, and will always have a great appreciation for that.
Osie here. Just sharing some thoughts now that the game is over.
Anyways, it's been fun. See you around.
And some of the items were just silly. It's easy to say 'the Eyes would be too powerful if they told you if they absorbed an ability'. But how powerful is that, really? You don't know what ability. You just know that they did something. Otherwise, it's just a dumb item that you spend 3 Sanity on(which is a considerable amount) to hope that it ever does something. Plus it's hugely diminished by Tom's kill apparently being not stoppable/redirectable/anything in any way. If you want to include items in a game(which I think is great, I love when games have extra things like this..Specialties are literally like the only games I play anymore), you have to be crystal clear on what those items do. Hiding this information just gives the scum a benefit that they shouldn't have.
All respect to rhand/cyan who were both great but town mvp was [the flavor] and it isn't close.
The free information about the heist (which was a super cool ability but that newspaper article basically ended the game singlehandedly), how people died, etc was absolutely ridiculous.
I've literally never seen town be given this much information in a game and y'all fools were complaining...
Last, rhand, and dawn were already too much info. Add the flavor, the items, re/joe that's enough of this rant
Way too much free info
I have a lot more thoughts and some of them are even things other than berating proph
Later
And did I complain yet about me being unblockable/unredirectable and redirected AND blocked last night?
Honestly I've never been so demoralized as after osi broke everything. I went from having choices who to fake a guilty on to my buddy being the only person that could have performed the nightkill and game over. That and the dawn modkill ended whatever small chance I had left and I knew it
I think the roles themselves were really well done and balanced, items a little much, and the flavor was brutal.
But we still would have had a punchers chance with, like, an *average* team.
I can understand being gruff about the Heist, but this is just more of the same point. The full list of AH items should have always been available(and maybe was, I don't remember now), so as soon as X items disappeared at once, it would have been obvious what happened. And you guys had the benefit of us thinking that LW's RB wouldn't stop someone from being on the Heist(because the ability was worded so oddly), even though it would have. If we'd understood that, RE would have been absolutely confirmed town the entire game, instead of only becoming effectively confirmed when Cantrip got lynched and flipped the role that it made the most sense for RE-scum to have.
And like come on. Items just vanished when they were used up, so you guys got to use things and know exactly what happened, while we literally had no idea and just had to surmise that 'some item got used at some point'. The possibilities for second guessing yourself as town in this circumstance are literally endless.
You messed up defending Cantrip, and I think you know it. I guess you felt like you'd have lost out to POE otherwise, and you might have, but you HARD defended Cantrip, and it just only made sense for you to do so if you were scum with him, no matter how much you tried to run the 'I'm just a *****lord' defense for doing so.
And Dawning was never getting lynched after the start of Day 5; it was overwhelmingly obvious that she was being truthful about everything there. Her getting modkilled was the best thing that could POSSIBLY have happened for you there, because I 100% would have shot you last night if there had been even one more town body around.
Then I just embraced it and probably went too far but yolo
I’m still reading spec chat, but @Shadow: You were my biggest scumread going into Night, together with Iso. I figured targetting Iso wasn’t going to work because I believed at least the hiding aspect of his claimed role was true, so you were my best shot.
So no, it wasn’t random luck
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Non-Staff Quasi-ModWhile I really liked the flavour and the mechanics (items, auction house etc.), I at times felt this game was drowning in complexity. I really had trouble keeping up with all the items, who had what, what the items did on top of all other things happening.
Also, I really felt that the auction-mechanics, while really nice, needed some fixing. First of all, having to try to guess what all the biddable items do (unless you were SJT, who had his day ability to help him) can be bit hard, especially if you are not familiar with the flavour and so can be a bit turn-off. Then, the whole will system, which ensured that more and more items were brought to game every day, but none of them really ever left the game (unless it was x-shot item that used all its shots) and having to publicly either will them or have town decide who gets them made things really hard for mafia. It punishes mafia every time they lose a member as town gets all of their stuff unless mafia publicly donates their stuff to a buddy, which then makes that buddy look bad. And on top of all, mafia shooting someone having trouble some items is not a solution at all, it'll just move all the items and abilities from one player to second.
Then, the information given to players. While I learned in ZE that giving too much information to players is bad, not giving anything to players is also bad. I usually give out to my players one of the following replies: Your ability has failed / You have successfully used your ability on X / You have successfully used your ability on Y instead of the original target.
This is to make sure weird interactions don't accidentally turn the game into a huge flaming pile of bastard mafia (like, mafia redirecting cop from scum to town and just telling town cop "your target is town" without informing them about their target getting changed).
Also, lastly, I was bit sad to see DBS getting modkilled, since 1) it made town's life even more easier 2) I wanted to replace into that slot
Still, overall, huge thanks for osie and DV for this whole game. Even though it had some problems, I still see that you put tons of effort into this game and it shows. I'm really eager to see what kind of game your guys will be bring us next (together or separate).
But that's because we got the few expendable items and town got all the ones that stayed around forever lol
I'm not, like, complaining a huge amount about this setup it was still winnable if the cantrip and dota slots had played and proph hadn't frankly embarrassed himself
But it was pretty clearly townsided with the items and info
This is funny to me, in that Iso was the other person I was considering vigging N1 heh. Ultimately though I just couldn't get over how really, really obviously scum DOTA was. Like his vote on Vezok was just...unreal bad.
This is always how it should be. Always. I cannot think of a circumstance where it should be any other way. If you don't want to confirm the existence of an RB by saying 'you got roleblocked', that's fine. But if someone's ability fails, they should know. If it doesn't, they should know. If they got redirected, they should ABSOLUTELY know.
I do agree about Wills though. Town should have been able to Will one item to someone else; at most. We shouldn't have just been able to stockpile items constantly, that's too much.
I'm sorry that I had to replace out, especially since that seems to have cost us the game. Something happened IRL and I had to stop everything in my life including work for a little over a week to take care of it and there was no chance I could play or do anything in the game for that period. I'm sorry for my activity issues as well, work suddenly became really really hectic right after I replaced in and it wasn't anything I could foresee at the time. It's hard to find time for anything else while working 140 hour weeks, and when I did have little slivers of time, my priorities were with my partner and immediate things of concern IRL, then the game second. I also didn't anticipate how insanely busy/active the game would be.
I didn't really follow the game, but congrats town on the win, you were all super engaged and proactive and it was really nice to see people working so hard to solve a game together.
Kudos to DV for coming up with such a creative and complex setup. I think the will system was a little too townsided, since mafia couldn't really pass on items to each other without basically risking outing themselves (the only reason it partially worked this game is because tom/shadow wifom stuff). Items were always going to pool into towns hands, I think. And because item usage can be clearing for town (and never really for mafia), on top of the utility of the items themselves, it's a lot to overcome for mafia. More KP for mafia may have helped to deal with that, maybe.
There were also too many clears for town, I think. A generic rule I follow is that town should never have more clears than there are mafia. Town had over 5 clears, this game. I don't know exactly how many clears there were, but there were a lot, even if some of them weren't hard clears. I think the way that we used my role came the closest to matching that kind of clearing power, but that required a lot of creativity and effort, whereas town only had to use their items as they were given and be transparent about that, if that makes sense. It's hard to balance such a crazy setup like this, though.
Town definitely shouldn't have been told the number of mafia that went on the heist when mafia had no idea that it was a traceable action. It was also just overpowered. Town did a really good job of solving in that PoE, too, so credit to them.
I loved nailing the ah# read on Joe to steal the Tommy gun, even though we didn't get to use it. I loved coming up with completely believable fake claims for me, cantrip, AND proph (seriously I gave him a good claim AND told him cyan probably targeted himself no idea why he thought he knew better)
Yeah that was legit impressive. If only we hadn't lost the gun straight away (boo wills).
And it had yet more flavor accompanying it, and was pretty obviously from the mafia like
I think you might be thinking there's other examples of this and there's just not. Vanillizing is good, obviously. But shadow not flipping with it is a super tiny deal
You did all the things that I would normally do for my mafia team. You kept us organized and informed, you coordinated stuff, you did the legwork for stuff like hunting down the AH numbers, you put in tons of time and care into the game and were always chill about it, yeah, you were good for morale.
Boop.
Had a great time
Think the setup was really ambitious and cool just a bit stacked against mafia
Think town played well, and I'm pretty happy with what I put in
No salt at all. Just... thoughts
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Non-Staff Quasi-ModWhat did you come up with for him? Didn't see it anywhere.
Suck it. I was very, very well aware that Tom was highly likely to be scum, I just didn't want to fire when I didn't have to.
And of course I shot Atog. He was fairly scummy, he was in the POE, his role involved the Auction House.
Oh and right. You roleblocked RHAND, arguably the most town confirmed person in the entire game. The game would have just been instantly over if that hadn't happened. You directly assisted the scum. Get over yourself you clown.
And yes, I definitely highly valued my role. Vig is easily the second best town role, behind Cop. 3rd is..who ******* knows, but it's not particularly close. Also, I value myself as a player more than anyone else that was alive and likely town at that point, take that however you will.
Ultimately, you are a stone garbage player and have no business questioning my play, or anyone else', for that matter. You RBed the same person TWICE even though you should have known after the first time that he was 100% clear town, except you couldn't understand your own role PM. I'm honestly glad that I only play like one game per year, because if I signed up to another game with you any time soon, I'd just replace out to save myself the heartache of listening to your nonsense.
I also see that You decided not to inform Cyan when the Eye triggered, but when I asked you how the item worked you told me it would get a counter?
Not that I’m complaining. I loved this game and the mechanical puzzles it created.
Be grateful, always."
You were effectively roleblocked anyway, though, because both of your targets targeted Cyan which sent them to the Otherworlds.
I have some set up thoughts that I'll probably post piecemeal over the next couple days. The TL;DR there is basically that the AH made the game really snowbally in either direction and the wolves probably needed some kind of factional ability to affect the auction house like extra auction numbers or something (we've talked about that pretty extensively in spec chat so I'll probably be repeating a lot of what D_V says there lol).
As far as the Heist goes I think there are really only two ways to "fix" that. Have the names of all the items in the AH known up front instead of waiting until D3 to add some items and leave it to the wolves to figure out that the town can figure out how many items were stolen *and* to the town to actually do that; or obfuscate how many items are in the auction house by removing the lot numbers and randomly deciding a subset of items to be bid on that day instead of voting for items. Since the item names often weren't related to the item's function and the item's actual powers were hidden, this shouldn't really change anything about how items are chosen. It was basically random anyway except the Holy Water bids.
I think it was a misplay to have all of the wolves heist in the first place because it should have been obvious that we could figure out how many items were stolen by checking which lot numbers were missing. But a lot of the wolf roles felt weak when I reviewed the set up so I can't really blame you guys, heh. Most of the raw power was tied up in DoTA's role or was counter play for the frankly silly amount of investigative power in the set up. It would have mattered *less* if DoTA hadn't also died N1 because his flip basically told us that the number of missing items = the number of wolves. Hrm. Actually maybe you could get away with just not doing full role reveals...
I'm a bit flummoxed at my own role, specifically the King in Yellow Screenplay. I know D_V said he would change it already, but, the fact that I would have lost the new abilities after successfully making a kill and that that whole business was hidden is kind of. I would have been upset if myself or Cyan had gotten lynched over, let's just say that. And I never did ask, but presumably my current sanity wouldn't have been affected upon changing back and if I had succeeded at killing someone I would have died to sanity loss anyway.
The Ward of Cthulhu was a busted item that probably shouldn't have made it past review lol. I'm glad it didn't really have a chance to affect the game. My favorite future fix would be to allow the targeting action to go through before sending that person to the Otherworlds, similar to the way the Sign works.
Shadow's tablet was a silly item and probably should have just given the choice between gold, item, and ability cop, if not just done all three at once.
Wolves probably needed to be able to activate abilities and items at the same time. They didn't actually have any night abilities other than the kill, but that alone could narrow the PoE pretty considerably.
Wolf AH fix is to give them dummy numbers they can bid under instead of Cantrip's anonymous bidder ability, I think D_V already said that. The wills were also a bit of a problem, but I'm not sure how to fix that. Either just remove them and items on dead players are removed from the game (opens up a bit of design space to take items from dead players I guess) or allow wolves to pass items without having to use the will system.
Uhm. I'll post some more thoughts later probably.
Sometimes you can be very unpleasant. Which is frustrating because you are clearly much better at intuitively solving games than I am but your "left handedness" makes you frustrating to play with. Mafia is a social game. It's not just about being right/wrong it's about communication and collaboration. And while you're very good at the solving part you seem to enjoy being intentionally bad at the other parts. So no matter how right you consistently are you're not someone I enjoy playing with right now. Which is a shame because you're on a really hot streak of solving games right now but it's just not worth it.
@Cyan same thing man. You smaahed this game. Were awesome and had awesome reads. And deserve a ton of credit for that. But like maybe don't call people "stone garbage". Wisp talked a lot in the chat about not being great and being confused a lot. And yeah having a player who admits to having a bad game second guess you can be infuriating, but like that doesn't mean his opinion is worthless. I'm not really building to a big point here I just want us to not be horrible to each other. Wisp doesn't bring the keenest insight or the carefulest reading to the game but he tries and he's (usually though not in this specific circumstance) humble.
Anyway I had an absolute blast this game and I'm so happy I managed not be mislyched. I got somethings right (Cantrip being scum and them using the chat as a daychat) and many more wrong (Prop, Vezok, Gemma, and some really bad conspiracies) and enjoyed figuring this all out together. Thanks everyone and especially our mods.
When I told you after pirates that I'd taken advantage of being scum and was enjoying trying to mislynch you it hurt you. Knowing the arguments I'd made were disingenuous and specifically targeted at you hurt. Which is completely reasonable. But if you're going to ask me to be a better person and expect me to take you seriously you need to hold yourself to that same standard. And you haven't been. I'm not religious but "do unto other's as you would have other's do unto you" is a genuine bit of wisdom.
1. There was a LOT of frustration in this game, and I hated how this reflects on D_V and Osie. The amount of effort required to make and mod this game was astronomical.
2. DawningBluSky at first I just didn't understand the way you thought, but you became actively unpleasant there toward the endgame, which really bummed me out.
3. Cyan you played a fantastic game, but you kind of gave away the highground there at the end with your comments around wisp.
4. Tom, you played well. Really well. I was totally convinced that you and cantrip were town thanks to the way you manipulated the daychat day 4.
More thoughts when I have more time and icafe credit. GGWP all.
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StaffJust a reminder to anyone who ever tried to read me for spew, I know what I’m doing
Also, the chat with Tom/Gemma/proph was because Scum didn’t get day chat after like 1 week of real time.
@cyan: With regards to me Vanillaizing Terry; I sent in my action less than 1 min after DV distributed the tommy gun, so it wasn’t really his fault for waiting around, I was pretty keen on not getting Day killed.
@Rhand: that’s fair, just unfortunate for me that one of the people who actually thought I was scum was also a cop. Great play this game though, you deserve the MVP.
Huge Props to Tom for making this game at least a sport and not a collapse. His replace in was the only thing that made this not stupid. I wish I’d not been copped, but it seems a theme for me.
I’ve talked about balance in the spec chat plenty, and people have brought up stuff here as well, but yeah, great design, but it had some serious inertia problems.
I definitely enjoyed what little of the game I did get to play though
I hope y’all enjoyed my outed wolf trolling, I certainly did.
My favourite things about this game:
1. The scum not overriding me in the AH for rift of zhar or mark of Cthulhu. Ohh man am I glad I was super serious about stopping those broken ass items from falling into scum hands. Sheeit.
2. Silvercrys. I don't think you should have killed yourself until you'd made a mechanical impact on the game, but your last day contributions actually made me feel real life regret that you weren't going to stay around. #imnotcryingurcrying
3. Getting trolled by osie over my trying to figure out what the hell the elder gods were. I must have sent 10+ messages and no solid answers.
4. D_V's willingness to continue despite bitterness to finish the game after mistakes were made. <3
5. Grape. The hero gotham needed but didn't deserve. IM SORRY I GOT YOU KILLED ACCIDENTALLY FREN I JUST WANTED TO PREVENT AN (APPARENTLY UNDOC-UNREDIRECTABLE) KILL >.<. He kept me filled up and rifting for three days.
6. My utterly mis-guided glee over "fooling" the scum with my philosopher"s stone play in the daychat not realising the scums were all listening in. LOL. I'm good at this game.
7. Buying the truth potion. I'm aware it was the only thing that kept me alive.
8. The pocketwatch. I love that item's design. Super expensive and probably a huge liability for the town, but it felt super powerful to use.
I don't have much to add except to say that the pocket watch is one of the best designed abilities I've ever seen. I'm thinking of ways of introducing it into a normal game without being either too swingy or too broken.
Thanks to DNC at Heroes of the plane studios for this awesome sig and SGT_Chubbz for the awesome avy.
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