Grapefruit is refusing to answer if scum can kill and use an ability either way, which is unfortunate because if he did I could have been cleared by now.
If I remember correctly*, someone asked/confirmed that the message mechanic in this game functions like a power role. I sent a message to Cantrip the Night tom died, so it looks like we're both clear.
*I want to find the post, but I can't remember how it was worded so searching is gonna be a nightmare.
No wait, I just remembered. Grape confirmed to me a while back (before/during Night 4) that sending messages counted as power. That's mainly why I sent one to Cantrip, on the off-chance it would clear me. Also because I was worried that I would die and scum!tom would win. >_>
So the answer is obviously yes, scum can use an ability and the factional kill simultaneously. If I were scum, then I was able to send a message to Cantrip and kill tom. Eco actually is scum, and he sent an item to Highroller while killing Cantrip.
Dunno if knowing that really makes a difference either way.
As for whether or not GJ is double bluffing, that's up to your personal interpretation. Eco and I are both sitting here with (almost) all the information out in the open, and of course we're going to assert that we're both telling the truth. I think the only genuine part of GJ's rant was vezok's and his own demise, as well as the lack of Daychat. Scum are always salty about no Daychat.
But I also know that he used the opportunity to slip Eco into the towncircle, by pretending to be pissed off about town having an inventor, and the scumteam only having one PR.
It doesn't really matter, because outed scum either lie or tell the truth so that you think they're lying. The only posts like that worth analyzing are ones where they blow up at people they obviously aren't aligned with, but there's usually a rule against that.
No wait, I just remembered. Grape confirmed to me a while back (before/during Night 4) that sending messages counted as power. That's mainly why I sent one to Cantrip, on the off-chance it would clear me. Also because I was worried that I would die and scum!tom would win. >_>
So the answer is obviously yes, scum can use an ability and the factional kill simultaneously. If I were scum, then I was able to send a message to Cantrip and kill tom. Eco actually is scum, and he sent an item to Highroller while killing Cantrip.
Dunno if knowing that really makes a difference either way.
Incidentally, the item I got was a one-shot roleblock. Woulda been really useful yesterday...
So, I'm going to reread the thread and then cast my vote. The thing is, I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of spare time tomorrow, so the vote will probably come Thursday. So I guess you guys are going to have a day of staring each other down.
... I'm kind of afraid to think of what might happen by the end of Wednesday.
Incidentally, the item I got was a one-shot roleblock. Woulda been really useful yesterday...
So, I'm going to reread the thread and then cast my vote. The thing is, I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of spare time tomorrow, so the vote will probably come Thursday. So I guess you guys are going to have a day of staring each other down.
... I'm kind of afraid to think of what might happen by the end of Wednesday.
The sexual tension might become unbearable by then.
Vote count Final
Vaimes (2): Eco, Highroller
Eco (1): Vaimes
That's majority. Vaimes has been killed.
Vaimes was John Connors Vanilla Town
In your prime you were a fighter pilot for the US Air Force. Now you travel the world under cover as a Lockheed-Martin recruiter. You've handled blueprints for every fighter, bomber, and drone being manufactured or prototyped in the last 10 years.
Highroller has been endgamed. The scum team Ecophagy, GJ, and Vezok are victorious.
Congrats to them and thanks to everyone for playing.
You're a veteran of the cold war. You ran more missions into East Berlin than any other man or woman. While your joints ache these days, and you can't quite see the smallest writing without your reading glasses anymore you have what no one else does. Experience and confidence
Ecophagy was Desmond Reynolds Mafia Quartermaster.
Marvelous Gadgets (Inventor): Each night you may chose a player to give 1 of the following: 5G Phone (1 day message), 2x Satellite Uplink (watcher shot), 2x Micro EMP mine (Roleblock shots). Each gadget costs 1 coin to give out.
You were always good with your hands. By age 7 you had taught yourself how a steam engine worked, by 9 you had drawn up plans for 1. By 13 you'd made your own programming language. By 15 you had been recruited by NASA to design rockets for them. But that was never enough for you. So you left all that behind and started designing helpful little tools for a more discreet line of work.
The mafia team shares coins
You win the game when the scum team controls the vote.
I have a lot to say about the setup, but I'm on a phone so right now I'm going to bask in this win. Thank you Highroller, and no hard feelings vaimes I hope.
I'm confused why you didn't use any VCA vaimes. Eco never voted a buddy, and always NKed people starting to find him suspicious. There was tonnes you could do.
Highroller, confused as to why you would think the calmer of the two was town. Town tend to be aggro in lylo. Not sure why you would think otherwise.
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I am also called Riku. I tend to prefer being called riku.
Highroller pretty much had his mind made up. YesterDay it was “if we go to LyLo I think it’s Vaimes” and toDay it was “Vaimes, I came into this Day thinking it was you.”
I presented my case, I’m always town here because aggroing the one guy who’s most likely to catch me as the last scum is not in my scum meta at all.
Plus the scumteam fell so quickly that town fell into the trap of “oh no now the last scum has no telling interactions.”
There was a reason people had a hard time choosing between Eco and LnGR.
It should’ve always been Eco or Lngr. I didn’t completely understand why you became a real option all of a sudden.
But then again, same goes for the Shadow lynch and my lynch
shadow lynch was fun, but I think he’d have been a better LyLo buddy.
My lynch was dumb, but then there were several dumb lynches.
This game has taught me to be more mindful of dead townies, as eco was someone I’d called possible scum, and specifically challenged the town read on and no one followed suit.
Congrats to the scum team though, even if I’m bitter about it.
I'm confused why you didn't use any VCA vaimes. Eco never voted a buddy, and always NKed people starting to find him suspicious. There was tonnes you could do.
While this is very true, there's a a decent amount of hypocrisy here - orthodox analysis isn't exactly a common component of your play, and I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if it was. Without rolling power, you'd have very much been in the frame for the lynch on D1.
Also I'm going to hold you to this:
It'll be good for your health, and maybe your scumhunting too.
Setup - In my opinion, this game was grossly town-sided. I predicted as much pre-game, but I very much underestimated it. I'm sure a lot of these things have been considered already, but I spent a lot of my solitude stewing over the setup so I'm going to comment at length anyway.
VT Cop - This role is only fractionally weaker than a full alignment cop. With 11 not-him players, he investigates TEN of them as accurately as an alignment cop, with Riku being the only exception. The single coin cost isn't really a hinderance since being on the lynch is easy if you want to, I only wasn't because I a) didn't want to lynch my buddies and b) didn't want to give the town more tools. So as a 90% full alignment cop, the role is overpowered. And "follow-the-cop" is a significantly less fun game than mafia is. Role would be better as a vanilla cop, as at least the rich scum would show up clear and the potential existance of goons makes the cop far less certain. Or 2 or even 3 coin cost.
Tracker/1-shot RB - This role is strong but fine. It could have been argued as a scum role, which is good. But it would be weaker (and much more interesting) if it could track messages. Since as the game stood, a positive result would be scum 3/4 actions (vezok, me, NK vs Tom), which is a high hit rate. Also him not costing coins to track was unexpected - it seems out of place in the setup, which I was expecting to have lots of weakish abilities that cost coins, rather than all the town power concentrated in two players.
Rich Townies - I am absolutely baffled as to why these guys counted as vanilla. The game becomes a million times more interesting if they show up as not-VT to the cop and can be tracked (and also show up as non-vanilla on Vezok's cop shot). On top of that, having three Rich Townies vs one Rich Scum should really have meant all or most of the Rich townies should have been cleared once GJ flipped - it was clear scum needed more power than 2 Rich + Vezok, and GJ not claiming Rich meant that the scum didn't think it was a safe claim (which it probably is if they have 2 since that would suggest more). So potentially clearing THREE townies off one scum death is broken, and I'm incredibly glad everyone just ignored it. Furthermore, they didn't really add anything to the game - messaging is already of limited use, and the ability to send an extra one doesn't make them any more useful.
Messaging - This came up in spec chat, but ultimately the mechanic was a bit pointless - as borne out by the lack of messages sent. It was correctly identified that those who can use it most (power roles) are constrained by it costing their Night action. And there's very little need for other townies to send messages since their thoughts would already be in thread. Very infrequent are the times where you do an important enough re-read during Night that absolutely MUST be passed on. Sending messages mostly only existed to prove another Night action wasn't taken (which would have been very breakable if scum had been relying on more roleblocks near the end of the game). The tracebility of knowing who gets coins also limited the ability for the scum to send disruptive/misleading messages.
Rich Scum - Seperate to the issue of him clearing the Rich townies, this role plus the sharing of coins made it look like just a goon who existed to give us a bonus-start coin that we could use to rush Vezok's vanilla cop shot or ensure we got a Night action. This made it appear unsafe to claim, whereas I imagine the mods were expecting all the Rich guys to claim at once and have a jolly old laugh at it all. It would have been very useful to know there were other Rich players in the game! This isn't necessarily bad, but I think it indicates the designers not considering the game from the scum perspective and just looking at the game with full knowledge.
Scum Vanilla cop/RBer - This role is crap: the 2-cost vanilla cop is very weak, overcosted, and tells us nothing about the Rich townies. I think a 1-coin rolecop would have been completely fair, even if the roleblock cost 2 coins. A second roleblock shot would have been nice, but that's not a disaster.
Quartermaster - I am generally against giving scum roles that only exist to appear town. I am rather against scum roles that are difficult to use for the scum (Watch shots are much better at finding protectives than investigatives, and giving an item to a scum buddy is high risk). I am very against roles like that that give the town very powerful tools (like Watch shots and Roleblocks). I am completely against it when the items you can give are actually traps because the town already so much investigate power that more is suspicious AND they already have a bonus roleblock, AND the role itself doesn't really fit into the setup on the town side. Pretty much everything about my role was a disaster and I'm quite cross about it (apart from the flavour, that was cool). It's one thing to give scum a role that actively works against their own team, but quite another to stip any benefit from it as well.
Overall - I'm disappointed in the balance and setup to be honest. I know this isn't easy and the focus was more on the possibilities of message sending and how Rich townies or scum might use them to gain an edge, but it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that a virtually full alignment cop is overpowered and that the scum have some seriosuly crap tools that double as traps, and that the town power could be more distributed. The lack of protective roles is insufficient as a balancing factor, and just makes the whole thing more swingy.
I don't know what the actual involvment was for each member of the mod team, but I have some advice that I intend constructively:
Wuffles - Your games are always town sided (and I'm going way back to thgames ings like Fairytale Mafia) because the town get more and more interesting tools than the scum do. This appears to me to stem from your preference/ease with creating town roles and a dislike/struggle with scum roles. Your games are super cool and imaginative, but you need to focus on the interplay and fun for the scum more than you currently do, and confront (the diffcult act of) cutting or modifying stuff that is really cool but ultaimtely not good for the game as a whole.
Osie - I think you need to spend more time looking at the bigger picture of a game. I think you can focus too much on minutiae or neat interactions/possibilities or individual things being cool and lose sight of the overall balance/interplay between teams.
Grapefruit - I understand your desire to explore the "additional messaging" mechanics, but you need to produce more incentive to use them - people don't need to send thoughts, and only rarely will gambit by privately revealing action results etc. I think ultimately the space has been explored and found to not be nearly as interesting as it could be in principle, but I can't fault your dedication. I do, however, think you need to ensure that games you make not only have a neat mechanic and ways to interact with it (message passing or not), but that they are also fundamentally balanced. Recall, for example, the dubious usage of the Jailer in Neighbours, and I think there's something of a (small dataset!) pattern of getting caught up in mechanics and the excitement of how they might be used that neglects the important step of bulding solid, balanced foundations.
Despite all my complaining, the game was fun-if-nervewracking, and there was a lot of scope for interesting things to happen even if they didn't manifest, as well as future design space. The flavour was good and the moderation was excellent. I would certainly encourage Grape (and his reviewers) to continue making games, just with more introspection about overall balance.
I'm confused why you didn't use any VCA vaimes. Eco never voted a buddy, and always NKed people starting to find him suspicious. There was tonnes you could do.
While this is very true, there's a a decent amount of hypocrisy here - orthodox analysis isn't exactly a common component of your play, and I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if it was. Without rolling power, you'd have very much been in the frame for the lynch on D1.
Also I'm going to hold you to this:
It'll be good for your health, and maybe your scumhunting too.
*aahem. there goes the second joy in my life.*
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I am also called Riku. I tend to prefer being called riku.
Highroller pretty much had his mind made up. YesterDay it was “if we go to LyLo I think it’s Vaimes” and toDay it was “Vaimes, I came into this Day thinking it was you.”
In fairness to me though, I started out today thinking, "Ok, Vaimes is the obvious choice, but is it too obvious?" Then you make a post saying, "It can't be me. When I'm mafia, it's really obvious!" Which kind of clinched it for me.
Highroller pretty much had his mind made up. YesterDay it was “if we go to LyLo I think it’s Vaimes” and toDay it was “Vaimes, I came into this Day thinking it was you.”
In fairness to me though, I started out today thinking, "Ok, Vaimes is the obvious choice, but is it too obvious?" Then you make a post saying, "It can't be me. When I'm mafia, it's really obvious!" Which kind of clinched it for me.
I don’t know why. It really is obvious. I wouldn’t make up something that you can check for yourself and be like “wow yeah, I opened this recently completed game and can already smell the scum on Vaimes.”
Game was definitely a bit townsided, but dont think my role was THAT bad. Still worse than a full cop, which is an acceptable if unfun role. Along with ruma though its just too much info. Should have realized there was nothing scum could have to balance it if ecos role was town too.
Me and ruma stacking on gj the only thing that made a scum win possible.
@cheesecake
Real talk, not sure what random game you know me from that i apparently had no fun in at all but im truly baffled you thought i was hard to understand this game. I explained myself substantially more than usual. Its not even close
HR, I hope you have learned that not everyone that thinks you are scummy are in fact scum themselves.
I hope you have learned that two posts is not enough to declare someone suspicious.
Two posts is enough to call someone suspicious, depending on the posts. I have seen people nail scum on two posts. But I rarely call someone lock!scum over two posts. Suspicion =/= lock!scum.
First off thanks to everyone for playing. Despite all of the design flaws I'm going to get into here I think most everyone seemed to have a good time and the game largely went smoothly and drama free.
So this game went on a bit of a journey. It started off as a top down design around the idea of communists being infiltrated by capitalists. The message system was the postal system (as one of the few working government institutions) and was initially more robust (could send multiple messages in a night). The bounty mechanic was also a "joke" on the idea of everyone pitching in an being rewarded equally. I had envisioned it as a normal game but was told the game altering mechanics (bounty in particular) would change player behavior too much to make it a normal. So I either needed to strip out complexity or make it a mini. In the transition to a mini I ended up designing a much lower power game than I'd intended because I was afraid of the swinginess of extra PR's in a small game.
I think it was Osie who termed the name of the bounty mechanic and that inspired the flavor switch.
So where this game went haywire was my efforts to design a game with low PR counts. As Eco mentioned I have struggled with this in the past (see the random Jailkeeper in Secret Neighbors) and I try to get too cute. In this game I and my reviewers, who were practically codesigners, got really caught up in the idea of not letting the game be broken by claims and in the symmetry of the roles. That focus on cuteness got in the way of thinking about fun or balance.
I was so interested in not making a game solvable by a mass claim in no margin for error situations that I made a game overloaded with investigative power and completely lacking anything else. Tom's role was a result of that mindset. I had only considered the false positives aspect of it for PR's and the confusion that would happen if it forced the tracker/RB's to claim, that I hadn't considered how many blue checks it could generate. It's definitely less powerful than an alignment cop, but I'd consider a nearly full alignment cop unacceptable in a setup this size and this was close enough to be also unacceptable.
The inventor was my baby. I loved the idea of a scum role that gave out items. It started off it's life in the communism build as a black market retailer coming in to make a profit and survived the transition despite urging to kill it from my reviewers. Eventually I convinced them of the concept but the abilities it handed out were iterated so many times we lost track of the balance. At one point it had an entirely useless BP vest that was purely a false flag to look townie. That was correctly pruned by my reviewers. I think the idea of a scum inventor that is more accurately a scum Jack of All trades with a delay is a fine design but in this setup the abilities didn't work. The watch shots would flag it as obviously not!town in the set up with a near cop and a tracker and the RB was just silly given the other one shot RB's in the game. This was all due to me being so blinded by the love for the idea and town looking scum roles that I just didn't think enough about the play pattern of the role. Also the watch shots were genuinely awful for scum given they would see messages as well as actual roles and be pretty useless.
Vez's role was just bad design. The numbers were all wrong and didn't make sense. There was no reason for it to cost 2 coins for such a low powered ability. I honestly don't know what I was thinking and a quick look at the design channel doesn't make it any clearer. I think that is probably the biggest example of the bias towards town that Eco had mentioned. No one saw that role and bothered mentioning how weak it was. I think we were just too excited about the symmetry and didn't think about it enough.
Tom's role almost didn't exist. At one stage this game had neighbors who could unlock alignment confirms of each other. The rough idea was neighbors who could pay 2 coins each to unlock a hidden ability, which would be alignment confirmation of each other. This was immediately thrown out because it was A: incredibly swingy and B: made scum roles incredibly superfluous. Because I was on a quest to have as few PR's as possible it then evolved into a conditional Innocent Child. It was an IC that required 3 coins to go public and reveal. I really liked the concept but I was persuaded this would be an unfun role for the townie who confirms and for the scum who lacks any counter play. We were looking to add town power that wouldn't run into those same problems but ended up just making 75% of a cop and keeping a lot of the same "fun" problems.
A design concern we discussed a lot the idea of concentration of power, it was part of what led to the rich vanilla town role. The idea was to give town a diffuse power base so they wouldn't be SOL if a PR got shot N1. I'm no longer convinced this is a valid concern to have during design, but it was on our minds while putting this together. On the rich VT's themselves I stand by that role. It appearing as vanilla town was a fault of the Neocop design and not a failure of the role itself. The idea of giving a few messages for free is something I'd want to encourage if I'd given any reason for there to be messages in this game. If they'd been day messages or really any purpose it I like the design of giving a soft PR by providing an initial message but it's failure was tied to the failure of the of messages as a whole.
And that's really the crux of the game, it didn't have a reason to exist. A single message sent at the end of night is worthless. If sending a message hadn't used a PR action for the night then they would have had some utility. If they'd had a separate subnight and could have influenced night actions that would have been something. If they'd been tied to roles that would have been something. Instead they were a vestigial limb that was flavorfully cool but nearly useless. And actively harmful because they were tied to a generic mechanic where using one might feel like a suboptimal use of resources.
I disagree with Eco that all the design space of out of thread messaging has been plumbed but I agree with him that the easy space has. To use that space going forward it needs to have a close tie to other game mechanics and a reason to exist beyond just "this is cool".
The other thing I wanted to talk about was my effort to stop using the word lynch. It's a loaded word with an ugly history and doesn't really match the "reality" of the game. I'm not going to mention it again or lecture anyone beyond this discussion, I'm just going to continue trying to talk around word until I come up to something better to use and I'd encourage you to do the same.
Anyway I'd still love to have a talk about the design and not derail it with this talk.
I'd be interested in an alternative to "lynch", but it does match the reality of the basic game of Werewolf and no alternatives immediately spring to mind.
I think your analysis of where things went wrong is pretty, good, don't really have anything to add there.
I'd be interested in an alternative to "lynch", but it does match the reality of the basic game of Werewolf and no alternatives immediately spring to mind.
I think your analysis of where things went wrong is pretty, good, don't really have anything to add there.
In a lot of ways it does match (killing one of your own), but the democratic process really just doesn't match what happened in real life. I'm going to start toying with condemn/condemned and see how I feel about it.
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I don’t mind us sitting here quietly glaring at each other.
*I want to find the post, but I can't remember how it was worded so searching is gonna be a nightmare.
So the answer is obviously yes, scum can use an ability and the factional kill simultaneously. If I were scum, then I was able to send a message to Cantrip and kill tom. Eco actually is scum, and he sent an item to Highroller while killing Cantrip.
Dunno if knowing that really makes a difference either way.
As for whether or not GJ is double bluffing, that's up to your personal interpretation. Eco and I are both sitting here with (almost) all the information out in the open, and of course we're going to assert that we're both telling the truth. I think the only genuine part of GJ's rant was vezok's and his own demise, as well as the lack of Daychat. Scum are always salty about no Daychat.
But I also know that he used the opportunity to slip Eco into the towncircle, by pretending to be pissed off about town having an inventor, and the scumteam only having one PR.
It doesn't really matter, because outed scum either lie or tell the truth so that you think they're lying. The only posts like that worth analyzing are ones where they blow up at people they obviously aren't aligned with, but there's usually a rule against that.
I'm just going to ignore GJ's rant entirely.
I’m having fun.
No Ecos allowed.
So, I'm going to reread the thread and then cast my vote. The thing is, I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of spare time tomorrow, so the vote will probably come Thursday. So I guess you guys are going to have a day of staring each other down.
... I'm kind of afraid to think of what might happen by the end of Wednesday.
The sexual tension might become unbearable by then.
Would you both care to make any closing remarks?
Ecophagy?
Trust yourself.
And I won't strangle you if you lynch Vaimes.
Vote Vaimes.
Ecophagy, if you're mafia, hats off to you. You played a fantastic game.
Vaimes (2): Eco, Highroller
Eco (1): Vaimes
That's majority. Vaimes has been killed.
Vaimes was John Connors Vanilla Town
In your prime you were a fighter pilot for the US Air Force. Now you travel the world under cover as a Lockheed-Martin recruiter. You've handled blueprints for every fighter, bomber, and drone being manufactured or prototyped in the last 10 years.
Highroller has been endgamed. The scum team Ecophagy, GJ, and Vezok are victorious.
Congrats to them and thanks to everyone for playing.
You're a veteran of the cold war. You ran more missions into East Berlin than any other man or woman. While your joints ache these days, and you can't quite see the smallest writing without your reading glasses anymore you have what no one else does. Experience and confidence
Ecophagy was Desmond Reynolds Mafia Quartermaster.
Marvelous Gadgets (Inventor): Each night you may chose a player to give 1 of the following: 5G Phone (1 day message), 2x Satellite Uplink (watcher shot), 2x Micro EMP mine (Roleblock shots). Each gadget costs 1 coin to give out.
You were always good with your hands. By age 7 you had taught yourself how a steam engine worked, by 9 you had drawn up plans for 1. By 13 you'd made your own programming language. By 15 you had been recruited by NASA to design rockets for them. But that was never enough for you. So you left all that behind and started designing helpful little tools for a more discreet line of work.
The mafia team shares coins
You win the game when the scum team controls the vote.
spec chat here
I have a lot to say about the setup, but I'm on a phone so right now I'm going to bask in this win. Thank you Highroller, and no hard feelings vaimes I hope.
Thanks again to everyone for playing. I hope you enjoyed the game as much as I enjoyed hosting it!
Highroller sucks for being the first to mislynch me in like, two years.
I’m normally a brat in LyLo and didn’t think I’d really be able to convince Highroller if I blew up the thread with my flailing.
Highroller, confused as to why you would think the calmer of the two was town. Town tend to be aggro in lylo. Not sure why you would think otherwise.
Highroller pretty much had his mind made up. YesterDay it was “if we go to LyLo I think it’s Vaimes” and toDay it was “Vaimes, I came into this Day thinking it was you.”
I presented my case, I’m always town here because aggroing the one guy who’s most likely to catch me as the last scum is not in my scum meta at all.
I have a scummy playstyle and I yell a lot.
There was a reason people had a hard time choosing between Eco and LnGR.
It should’ve always been Eco or Lngr. I didn’t completely understand why you became a real option all of a sudden.
But then again, same goes for the Shadow lynch and my lynch
shadow lynch was fun, but I think he’d have been a better LyLo buddy.
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StaffThis game has taught me to be more mindful of dead townies, as eco was someone I’d called possible scum, and specifically challenged the town read on and no one followed suit.
Congrats to the scum team though, even if I’m bitter about it.
Club Flamingo Wins: 1!
The GJ way path to no lynching:
While this is very true, there's a a decent amount of hypocrisy here - orthodox analysis isn't exactly a common component of your play, and I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if it was. Without rolling power, you'd have very much been in the frame for the lynch on D1.
Also I'm going to hold you to this:
It'll be good for your health, and maybe your scumhunting too.
Setup - In my opinion, this game was grossly town-sided. I predicted as much pre-game, but I very much underestimated it. I'm sure a lot of these things have been considered already, but I spent a lot of my solitude stewing over the setup so I'm going to comment at length anyway.
VT Cop - This role is only fractionally weaker than a full alignment cop. With 11 not-him players, he investigates TEN of them as accurately as an alignment cop, with Riku being the only exception. The single coin cost isn't really a hinderance since being on the lynch is easy if you want to, I only wasn't because I a) didn't want to lynch my buddies and b) didn't want to give the town more tools. So as a 90% full alignment cop, the role is overpowered. And "follow-the-cop" is a significantly less fun game than mafia is. Role would be better as a vanilla cop, as at least the rich scum would show up clear and the potential existance of goons makes the cop far less certain. Or 2 or even 3 coin cost.
Tracker/1-shot RB - This role is strong but fine. It could have been argued as a scum role, which is good. But it would be weaker (and much more interesting) if it could track messages. Since as the game stood, a positive result would be scum 3/4 actions (vezok, me, NK vs Tom), which is a high hit rate. Also him not costing coins to track was unexpected - it seems out of place in the setup, which I was expecting to have lots of weakish abilities that cost coins, rather than all the town power concentrated in two players.
Rich Townies - I am absolutely baffled as to why these guys counted as vanilla. The game becomes a million times more interesting if they show up as not-VT to the cop and can be tracked (and also show up as non-vanilla on Vezok's cop shot). On top of that, having three Rich Townies vs one Rich Scum should really have meant all or most of the Rich townies should have been cleared once GJ flipped - it was clear scum needed more power than 2 Rich + Vezok, and GJ not claiming Rich meant that the scum didn't think it was a safe claim (which it probably is if they have 2 since that would suggest more). So potentially clearing THREE townies off one scum death is broken, and I'm incredibly glad everyone just ignored it. Furthermore, they didn't really add anything to the game - messaging is already of limited use, and the ability to send an extra one doesn't make them any more useful.
Messaging - This came up in spec chat, but ultimately the mechanic was a bit pointless - as borne out by the lack of messages sent. It was correctly identified that those who can use it most (power roles) are constrained by it costing their Night action. And there's very little need for other townies to send messages since their thoughts would already be in thread. Very infrequent are the times where you do an important enough re-read during Night that absolutely MUST be passed on. Sending messages mostly only existed to prove another Night action wasn't taken (which would have been very breakable if scum had been relying on more roleblocks near the end of the game). The tracebility of knowing who gets coins also limited the ability for the scum to send disruptive/misleading messages.
Rich Scum - Seperate to the issue of him clearing the Rich townies, this role plus the sharing of coins made it look like just a goon who existed to give us a bonus-start coin that we could use to rush Vezok's vanilla cop shot or ensure we got a Night action. This made it appear unsafe to claim, whereas I imagine the mods were expecting all the Rich guys to claim at once and have a jolly old laugh at it all. It would have been very useful to know there were other Rich players in the game! This isn't necessarily bad, but I think it indicates the designers not considering the game from the scum perspective and just looking at the game with full knowledge.
Scum Vanilla cop/RBer - This role is crap: the 2-cost vanilla cop is very weak, overcosted, and tells us nothing about the Rich townies. I think a 1-coin rolecop would have been completely fair, even if the roleblock cost 2 coins. A second roleblock shot would have been nice, but that's not a disaster.
Quartermaster - I am generally against giving scum roles that only exist to appear town. I am rather against scum roles that are difficult to use for the scum (Watch shots are much better at finding protectives than investigatives, and giving an item to a scum buddy is high risk). I am very against roles like that that give the town very powerful tools (like Watch shots and Roleblocks). I am completely against it when the items you can give are actually traps because the town already so much investigate power that more is suspicious AND they already have a bonus roleblock, AND the role itself doesn't really fit into the setup on the town side. Pretty much everything about my role was a disaster and I'm quite cross about it (apart from the flavour, that was cool). It's one thing to give scum a role that actively works against their own team, but quite another to stip any benefit from it as well.
Overall - I'm disappointed in the balance and setup to be honest. I know this isn't easy and the focus was more on the possibilities of message sending and how Rich townies or scum might use them to gain an edge, but it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that a virtually full alignment cop is overpowered and that the scum have some seriosuly crap tools that double as traps, and that the town power could be more distributed. The lack of protective roles is insufficient as a balancing factor, and just makes the whole thing more swingy.
I don't know what the actual involvment was for each member of the mod team, but I have some advice that I intend constructively:
Despite all my complaining, the game was fun-if-nervewracking, and there was a lot of scope for interesting things to happen even if they didn't manifest, as well as future design space. The flavour was good and the moderation was excellent. I would certainly encourage Grape (and his reviewers) to continue making games, just with more introspection about overall balance.
gg, thanks for hosting grape
*aahem. there goes the second joy in my life.*
And I agree with Ecophagy. There was almost no reason for a town to use the messaging mechanic, even if they didn't have an ability of their own.
In fairness to me though, I started out today thinking, "Ok, Vaimes is the obvious choice, but is it too obvious?" Then you make a post saying, "It can't be me. When I'm mafia, it's really obvious!" Which kind of clinched it for me.
That said as Eco noted I completely blew it with the Neapolitan cop. Just not a remotely balanced role.
That said I completely agree on the criticism that just tacking messages to a game does nothing. Games need to work as a cohesive unit.
Any I promise I will go over a bunch of my notes but I'm at a festival all weekend and it will be a while.
Club Flamingo Wins: 1!
Me and ruma stacking on gj the only thing that made a scum win possible.
Anyway eco played great to overcome it.
Gg
Real talk, not sure what random game you know me from that i apparently had no fun in at all but im truly baffled you thought i was hard to understand this game. I explained myself substantially more than usual. Its not even close
Two posts is enough to call someone suspicious, depending on the posts. I have seen people nail scum on two posts. But I rarely call someone lock!scum over two posts. Suspicion =/= lock!scum.
Club Flamingo Wins: 1!
First off thanks to everyone for playing. Despite all of the design flaws I'm going to get into here I think most everyone seemed to have a good time and the game largely went smoothly and drama free.
So this game went on a bit of a journey. It started off as a top down design around the idea of communists being infiltrated by capitalists. The message system was the postal system (as one of the few working government institutions) and was initially more robust (could send multiple messages in a night). The bounty mechanic was also a "joke" on the idea of everyone pitching in an being rewarded equally. I had envisioned it as a normal game but was told the game altering mechanics (bounty in particular) would change player behavior too much to make it a normal. So I either needed to strip out complexity or make it a mini. In the transition to a mini I ended up designing a much lower power game than I'd intended because I was afraid of the swinginess of extra PR's in a small game.
I think it was Osie who termed the name of the bounty mechanic and that inspired the flavor switch.
So where this game went haywire was my efforts to design a game with low PR counts. As Eco mentioned I have struggled with this in the past (see the random Jailkeeper in Secret Neighbors) and I try to get too cute. In this game I and my reviewers, who were practically codesigners, got really caught up in the idea of not letting the game be broken by claims and in the symmetry of the roles. That focus on cuteness got in the way of thinking about fun or balance.
I was so interested in not making a game solvable by a mass claim in no margin for error situations that I made a game overloaded with investigative power and completely lacking anything else. Tom's role was a result of that mindset. I had only considered the false positives aspect of it for PR's and the confusion that would happen if it forced the tracker/RB's to claim, that I hadn't considered how many blue checks it could generate. It's definitely less powerful than an alignment cop, but I'd consider a nearly full alignment cop unacceptable in a setup this size and this was close enough to be also unacceptable.
The inventor was my baby. I loved the idea of a scum role that gave out items. It started off it's life in the communism build as a black market retailer coming in to make a profit and survived the transition despite urging to kill it from my reviewers. Eventually I convinced them of the concept but the abilities it handed out were iterated so many times we lost track of the balance. At one point it had an entirely useless BP vest that was purely a false flag to look townie. That was correctly pruned by my reviewers. I think the idea of a scum inventor that is more accurately a scum Jack of All trades with a delay is a fine design but in this setup the abilities didn't work. The watch shots would flag it as obviously not!town in the set up with a near cop and a tracker and the RB was just silly given the other one shot RB's in the game. This was all due to me being so blinded by the love for the idea and town looking scum roles that I just didn't think enough about the play pattern of the role. Also the watch shots were genuinely awful for scum given they would see messages as well as actual roles and be pretty useless.
Vez's role was just bad design. The numbers were all wrong and didn't make sense. There was no reason for it to cost 2 coins for such a low powered ability. I honestly don't know what I was thinking and a quick look at the design channel doesn't make it any clearer. I think that is probably the biggest example of the bias towards town that Eco had mentioned. No one saw that role and bothered mentioning how weak it was. I think we were just too excited about the symmetry and didn't think about it enough.
Tom's role almost didn't exist. At one stage this game had neighbors who could unlock alignment confirms of each other. The rough idea was neighbors who could pay 2 coins each to unlock a hidden ability, which would be alignment confirmation of each other. This was immediately thrown out because it was A: incredibly swingy and B: made scum roles incredibly superfluous. Because I was on a quest to have as few PR's as possible it then evolved into a conditional Innocent Child. It was an IC that required 3 coins to go public and reveal. I really liked the concept but I was persuaded this would be an unfun role for the townie who confirms and for the scum who lacks any counter play. We were looking to add town power that wouldn't run into those same problems but ended up just making 75% of a cop and keeping a lot of the same "fun" problems.
A design concern we discussed a lot the idea of concentration of power, it was part of what led to the rich vanilla town role. The idea was to give town a diffuse power base so they wouldn't be SOL if a PR got shot N1. I'm no longer convinced this is a valid concern to have during design, but it was on our minds while putting this together. On the rich VT's themselves I stand by that role. It appearing as vanilla town was a fault of the Neocop design and not a failure of the role itself. The idea of giving a few messages for free is something I'd want to encourage if I'd given any reason for there to be messages in this game. If they'd been day messages or really any purpose it I like the design of giving a soft PR by providing an initial message but it's failure was tied to the failure of the of messages as a whole.
And that's really the crux of the game, it didn't have a reason to exist. A single message sent at the end of night is worthless. If sending a message hadn't used a PR action for the night then they would have had some utility. If they'd had a separate subnight and could have influenced night actions that would have been something. If they'd been tied to roles that would have been something. Instead they were a vestigial limb that was flavorfully cool but nearly useless. And actively harmful because they were tied to a generic mechanic where using one might feel like a suboptimal use of resources.
I disagree with Eco that all the design space of out of thread messaging has been plumbed but I agree with him that the easy space has. To use that space going forward it needs to have a close tie to other game mechanics and a reason to exist beyond just "this is cool".
Anyway I'd still love to have a talk about the design and not derail it with this talk.
I think your analysis of where things went wrong is pretty, good, don't really have anything to add there.
In a lot of ways it does match (killing one of your own), but the democratic process really just doesn't match what happened in real life. I'm going to start toying with condemn/condemned and see how I feel about it.