But still fun! Feel like I actually had a good game for a change, as opposed to just maybe being adequate.
Mad props to Tom for surviving as long as he did.
to Cantrip for doubting your own results. Last, you were very solid too, imo, and mainly got POE'd at the end (and needed a better claim, yeah)
Lot's of really strong Town people too. A few questionable choices, maybe, but, that happens. So, overall, really good game.
Thank you Proph!
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First, the setup. I enjoy low-powered setups and I hate cops, plus I wanted to use masons in an invitational-tier game because they are sweet roles to play as - plus, having a confirmed town buddy who is competent at the game is a huge boon. Masons didn't leave a lot of room for anything else, so I picked the bodyguard because they're one of the weaker protective roles and they're not as feels-bad as a doctor is. I was worried about the situation where the scum try to NK the masons and run into the bodyguard, but seeing as they still get a kill, I considered it an acceptable tradeoff.
I gave the scum a rolecop because there's literally nothing to roleblock in this setup (plus, roleblockers are not all that fun). Rewards skill, since it gives them directions to go in with the nightkill and serves as a good check to the masons. More than that, I wanted a setup that was /simple/. One thing I took full advantage in last year's invitational as scum was the paranoia about there possibly being 2 scum/1 SK in the setup since the players had no idea what to expect from Ged. I wanted a setup that was a traditional, low-powered basic, and I think this setup fit the bill rather nicely.
Given that Eco and Iso were able to figure out the setup so easily based off of my widespread design proclivities, however, I think it raises some questions. I like being pretty public about design theory because I enjoy talking about how mafia games are designed, and I feel like there's not enough literature on the topic. Will I ever get too predictable/modgameable as a mafia game designer if I keep posting my views on setup theory out in the open? I'm really just following mafia design principles I've learned over the years by talking to a lot of people on the subject/developing my own personal views, and I think these principles lead to fair and fun games, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Onto the gameplay.
I predicted the game would be a pretty overwhelming town victory no matter what the randomization was, because the playerbase was incredibly top tier and it would be an incredibly difficult game for any scum team to win. That said, I was a little hopeful when the randomization came out as Eco/GJ/Cyan, as I've seen all of these players carry teams on their backs before (Eco: Cyan's Impossible Mafia, GJ: Star Trek 3, Cyan: The Wall/Archer), so I thought the scumteam could perform pretty well.
Then Eco was pretty much flashwagoned based off of a couple of stray RVS posts, and then his scumbuddies couldn't really do anything but watch it happen. Then Iso kind of nailed the entire scumteam in the first 100 posts and never let go, and the rest is kind of history? The town probably would have won even if Iso wasn't even in the game, since GJ/Cyan weren't playing super strongly. Newcomb said that it's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario where if Iso didn't just completely nail the scumteam in the first 100 posts of the game, or Eco wasn't run up in the first page, then the scum would have probably played miles better than they did here. It's just that these situations happened, as as a result the scum's morale was pretty much dampened for the entire game.
Not to detract from the rest of the town's performance - the town played excellently this game, and they are fully deserving of this victory. Vaimes, Voxxicus, Newcomb, Seppel, and Nacho pretty much towned it up to avoid being mislynched, but part of me wonders that with a stronger scum performance the more mildly suspicious players like tom/Nacho/Seppel could have been taken advantage of and been mislynched. Basically put, the town gained a whole ton of momentum from the early Eco wagon. Even though Eco successfully avoided being lynched, the other two scum members - Cyan and GJ - were put in a bad spot due to it, and as a result just didn't Town it up while the rest of the town was coalescing and Towning it up throughout Day 1. The masons, plus the large number of behaviorally townie players, could allow a townie in this game to clear 5-6 players - and from there, solving the game isn't the hardest.
I feel like if the scum shifted the momentum on late-Day 1 and had Iso lynched instead of GJ, that could have totally changed the game and provided the scum with a chance to get back into the game. However, the calm, rational townies (Vaimes/Voxxicus/Chris/Newcomb) analyzed the gamestate and determined that GJ was more likely scum than Iso, and as a result switched their votes. That led to, basically, the scum falling over like dominos.
Giving Newcomb and Iso co-Town MVPs in this game. Newcomb for succeeding at the two pillars of Being Town (He was obvious town, engaged with the game, and convinced everyone to lynch GJ near end of Day 1) and Iso for, of course, being correct with every single facet of the entire game, even if he had a difficult time convincing others of his world view on Day 1.
I've already given my thoughts on the trust tell stuff in the Council, but I didn't really want to modkill Iso over it because it's technically not in the rules and I didn't really want to disrupt the gamestate - a common trend in my modding is to flip the table as little as possible. Still, Iso attempting to use his claiming of vanilla town to clear himself, yet not directly addressing it, really isn't something that should be permissible in any community, and it was definitely very angleshooty.
A tangent here, but I feel like there wasn't anything meaningful I could have done to make the game more memorable or fun. As Newcomb put it:
Bolded the last sentence for emphasis.
I believe that memories and experiences are important with a game like Mafia. We play mafia to have fun, of course, but I also think that experiences are important. Just compare this game to the most recently ended basic, Bare Bones. Bare Bones was incredibly exciting and passionate, with the mafia having a strong lead early until Silver and Vaimes literally teamed up to solve the game and chain lynch all three of the scum in a row. That was exciting. That was memorable. That was fun! I had a great time talking to Eco and Newcomb about that game after it ended.
With this game, the overwhelming narrative that comes out of it is Iso's slam dunk impressive performance, but I'm pretty sure most of you guys would say that this game wasn't especially fun or super-memorable. And I think that's fine - the most I can do as a game mod is to give a game the chance to become great, and if it doesn't, then c'est la vie. I'm honestly just wondering if there was anything I could have done to make this game /better/, since I feel like most of what happened this game was outside of my control. I could have definitely worked more on the flavor - I was really running on fumes with the flavor at the end there, and I think I'm just going to start pre-writing the flavor scenes from now on since people like to see flips fast.
But yeah, those are my thoughts on the game, and hopefully they provide a good jumping off point for further discussion. Let me know what you guys think; I spent a fair amount of reading and thinking about this game, and it kind of just ended up being pretty flat and a wet towel. I'm just wondering if there was anything I could have done to change that.
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/in
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1) Behavioral/mindset analysis
2) Vote count analysis
3) Interaction analysis
These are the cores of my scumhunting toolkit, and I strive to hone them whenever possible. I find it useful to approach the game from multiple angles, and combining together can help you form a coherent picture of the game.
For mindset analysis, you have to put yourself in the mindset of the person making that post. When looking at a post, ask yourself, "What does someone have to be thinking in order to make this post?" What are they trying to accomplish with that post? Are they trying to genuinely solve the game, and making a post to do precisely that, or are they faking it, and trying to go through the motions? Is the question that they're asking trying to help them figure out a specific player's alignment, or was the question asked to make the player look like they're scumhunting, and therefore making them look more town?
That's the key with mindset analysis. You have to look at a post that is alignment indicative (many throw-away posts aren't) and ask yourself, "What is this post trying to do?" Is the post trying to actively affect the game? Does that post move the game forwards?
Mindset analysis is really the key to scumhunting as town. If you're good at mindset analysis, then you will become a very feared scumhunter. Mindset is a bit more useful to generate town reads - like, say I'm pushing Iso, and detail lots of posts as to why he is scum and should be lynched. Look at my posts - am I town and genuinely believe that Iso is scum and should be lynched, or am I scum trying to drive a mislynch on Iso and I know that he will flip town?
Conviction is one of the strongest towntells, in my experience - just need to be careful if the player you're townreading due to it is town and has genuinely believed like they caught scum, or if they're scum and can genuinely bus a buddy because they know that they're scum. (I did this in the Invitational Day 2 with my scumbuddy Wheat, as I knew that aggressively pushing him, even going through the motions to defend townies like Seppel because I wanted Wheat dead, would make the game a lot easier).
If you can do mindset analysis properly, it should pretty much be the only tool you need to catch scum, as you can quite easily establish a "block" of townreads that are town and the scum will can never mislynch. Process of elimination takes care of the rest of the scum.
Like, if you were following GoldenEye, the reason why we were able to rout out the scum so quickly was because we had a strong "block" of town - TappingStones, me, Bloscovi, Silvercrys, not_a_gimmick - that the scum could never infiltrate. Mechanics and PoE made it really easy to identify the scum.
I'm not good at mindset analysis, so that's why I rely on the other two tools in my scumhunting "toolkit" - vote analysis, and interaction analysis - to root out scum.
Vote analysis has honestly gotten a little less effective here because it's been popularized so much, but I still think it's a useful tool. The key to vote analysis is to look at the votecounts and try and determine if there are scum on it. The heuristics to keep in mind are that in a five man wagon, there is likely to be at least one scum on it - especially in a small game - and on a mislynch, the chances that there is scum on the wagon rises to approximately 95%. With scum lynches, it's a bit tricker, but you can decently count on one of the scum bussing, and the other scum to be off the wagon.
We really haven't had many games solved by vote analysis for.. some reason, so let me pull up Twinborn Mafia for some example vote counts. Here's the Day 1 lynch of Twinborn:
Prophylaxis (7) - Mindreaver, tomsloger, Hunger, Tordeck, Huntzilla, Prophylaxis, killjoy
Votecount is skewed a bit since I had to vote myself to ensure a lynch at deadline, but say that it's Day 3 of this game, and you want to take a look at wagons. Mindreaver, Hunger, tomsloger, and I flipped, so it would look something like this:
Prophylaxis (7) - Mindreaver, tomsloger, Hunger, Tordeck, Huntzilla, Prophylaxis, killjoy
That's three names to pull out of a hat. Tordeck, Huntzilla, and killjoy. Due to my wagon being the Day 1 mislynch wagon, you can be 95% sure that there is scum on the wagon. Keep in mind: This is just one part of your scumhunting "toolkit". You can use mindset analysis to fill in the rest! So let's say that you think killjoy is town because his posts have been actively trying to solve the game. You now have Huntzilla or Tordeck to look at for potential scum.
Spoilers: Huntzilla is town, and Tordeck is scum. For some reason the town decided to lynch the triple voter because.. why, but yeah. That's generally how small game vote analysis works - you fill in the alignments of people you /know/ are town, you use other methods to determine how other people are town, and PoE out the scum. Vote analysis generally works better, IMO, if the town is losing, since you have more town flipped. Interaction analysis works better if the town is winning (you have more scum flipped), which I will get to now.
Interaction analysis is basically where you see scum flipped, and you pull up their posts and see how they interacted with other players. This is somewhat complex, and interaction analysis is mostly honed off of pattern recognition - you learn to recognize the common scum posts and see if they clear someone or not. The heuristic here is "If flipped scum doesn't interact with a player, it could be because they don't want to fake it". Generally, the more interactions flipped scum has with a specific player, the more likely that the specific player is town.
An easy way to keep track of interactions is the interaction chart. I do this by inputting a list of all of the players in code tags, and then go down the flipped scum's interactions. If they passively mention somebody, then it's a weak interaction and is a dash (-) in the chart. If they voted somebody or directly talked to them, then it's a major interaction and is a line (|). Like, do you remember Final Fantasy Mafia II? Take a look at this interaction analysis post from Wheat.
The scum in that game were KoolKoal, KamikazeArchon, Pizzaguy, Megiddo, Wheat, and vezok.
If you take a look at all of the major interactions (lots of lines) then you'll see that they were mostly all townies! Chris, DCIII, Iso, RelmArrowny, and Sepiriel were all town and could be cleared. Meanwhile, all the scum had weak interactions with Wheat, especially Pizzaguy. Of course, this doesn't tell the full story - you need to actually /look/ at the interactions in context - but I've seen the chart be right more often than not. If you see, I accompanied the chart with me actually looking at the interactions, and doing that I was able to clear many of the high performing townies and scumread Megiddo for having lots of "softball interactions" with Wheat. (Of course, that game ended up being one of my worst performances ever, but that post was a shining light in a sea of dreck).
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Yay.
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On another note: Can we please make not reading your role PM a blacklistable offiense (or formally state it out)? I think it pretty clearly goes against the spirit of the game.
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Flavor
Best modding 2016
The jury system
Some of the roles
What didn't work:
Vaimes's role
Poor wording of role PMs
I see you Togs, and I will definitely write this to focus a bit more on the play, but I want to talk about the setup too
If I had to sum of the design of this game in a sentence or two, it would be "Megiddo-style Specialty with actual effort put into the flavor, plus unique role designs". Megiddo is a good friend of mine and I've been greatly influenced by his style of design. His games (Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Presidential Mafia) usually have a central "hook" or mechanic, and then he builds off on them. With Presidential Mafia, it was the kingmaker system. With RtR/Gatecrash, it was the guild system. If you look at the design for this game, you'll notice something similar: Nearly every element was centered around the jury system, which we thought was a massive success (I'll get to that in a bit, though). We designed the jury system first, then we created roles that would explore that design space in a very cool way. The fact that we were able to pull it off, while staying true to the flavor of Ace Attorney was definitely one of the cooler aspects of the setup, in my opinion. Another plus of the setup was the fact that the mechanics did not detract much from the game. With these Specialty-type games, it's a very common trap to design your roles in such a way that they dominate the game. The fact that the jury system, as well as all of the 19 individual role designs did not detract from behavior is something we strived for, and daresay we succeeded at.
So that's the manifesto - we strove to design a game based around the game Ace Attorney, which Togs and I are huge fans of, while pushing the boundaries of role design and innovate using the jury system.
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There isn't really too much to say about the flavor, but I thought the fact that we provided flavor for every one of the lynch and opening scenes, as well as the Trial transition, was great. One of my pet peeves in mafia is when game mods go something like "Flavor coming later" and never providing it, since in my opinion, it damages the immersion and experience of a mafia game and turns your game into a forgettable one. I felt like the strongest flavor scene was Rhand's lynch scene, since it was the one I spent the most time on. Togs's role PM flavor for Godot and Sebastian (Cyan and Ghosting's roles) were IMO the best. I still laugh every time I read Ghosting's role PM. I was pretty proud of my Shi-Long Lang role PM flavor for smoothly transitioning him to have "evil" flavor, since he's normally a good guy/rival in the games. When I had to write for Klavier Gavin (Megiddo's role PM flavor) it was much harder because Klavier Gavin is one of the "cleanest" prosecutors and one of the most honorable.
Onto the modding. I pretty much declared this game my top priority and gave it every bit of modding energy I could - once again, I've played games with shoddy/not so good modding and they really put a damper on the game experience. I wanted the modding for this game to be so good that you didn't notice it, and judging by the positive comments about the modding (Seppel said something about the vote counts, and Anak was impressed by the speed of the action reception) this was another strong success. The modding was only good because I was able to offload some of the flavor scenes onto Togs, as well as strictly enforcing myself into giving vote counts every single day. If I had to offer tips to new mods, it's to gauge the pace of your game and provide vote counts - sometimes I posted two or three vote counts in one day since the game was moving super fast.
The jury system working well was also a very nice surprise. Before the game started, I noted that the jury system was the mechanic that was most likely to "go wrong", mostly because it wasn't tested and we spent little time working on it in review. We were very pleased for it to work out mostly how it was expected. I definitely think that the town could have done better controlling the jury if they monitored the jury votes, but the inclusion of one scum on each of the juries up until Day 5 didn't really harm the town? Iso could have confirmed himself as scum by not lynching Citrus and letting the deadline pass on Chris, but that was the only worrying part of the jury system. The jury system weakened the power of the lynch a bit (as if they got multiple townies arrested, like Day 2) but it could be pretty damaging to the scum as well: Day 3 was really when the town was on the ball and the jury was presented with multiple scum to lynch.
Some of the roles I thought were just basic "run of the mill" roles ended up working a lot better than expected. Sir Chris's neighborizer role was sort of a last-minute addition to the setup, but it ended up comboing very well with Gentleman Johnny, who was in jury three times until he got vigged. GJ could transmit messages to the jury from Chris, and Chris could use it to communicate with GJ at a time period where Chris could not speak. The communication barriers, and the fact that the neighbor role could transcend them, was a very neat thing that we did not notice in design.
We were also tickled at Citrus's role being EXACTLY used as we intended it to, as a way to "steal" the identity of someone else, which is what the Phantom actually did in Dual Destinies. The gameplay to story integration was epic. D_V also utilized his role well by channeling the dead spirit of Wheat, who had one of the best performances of a revived player I've ever seen. TappingStones was also funny as he blocked Anak from serving on the jury.. which ultimately ended up Anak getting to track the only scum role in the game that could be tracked.
On the flip side, I was really hoping to see Wheat's role (Ema) do something, since it was personally my most favorite role in the game. Seeing it get offed N1 was pretty heartbreaking.
Let's move onto what didn't work, and lessons to learn for next time.
Obviously the biggest mistake in retrospect was Vaimes's role. If I had to do the game again (and see how his role worked), I would have definitely made Vaimes need to target everyone in the game to win, and leave the game once he does. I would make him probably more of a friendly neutral rather than a Serial Killer, though as you can see in the review QT that Dahlia was in the game from the start (well, originally we had an even more wackier Neutral idea, but ZDS shot it down pretty quickly). Another idea would be to also make Dahlia some form of Hitman. However, the biggest mistake of Dahlia's role, I feel, was the "rug pulled out from under" the town. This is a cheating feeling that should never occur in a game ever, and I'm really sad that it occurred in ours. It's reminiscent of the "secret wincon" Clan Content Mafia 6 had. I thought it was pretty clear that the town would win if Vaimes left the game, as Iso would have been the eventual lynch on Day 6 - so feel free to count this as a spiritual town win, for any townies out there.
Another problem would be with the poor role PM writing. This is mostly with D_V's and GJ's roles. D_V's role was very poorly written, and we wished that we clarified the role better. We were actually considering letting GJ send a message N1, but it wouldn't have accomplished much. Speaking of GJ's role, I wish we just scrapped it and put a different role in. The original "Journalist" role - which lets players display a message during the Night - is a solid one, and I think it could have been used well, but the yes-no modifier and the questions just nerfed the role way too much.
I'll probably go over play in another post since this one is too long and I need to sleep.
One final tip I would offer new game mods is to strongly consider a co-mod/backup-mod for your game. This is so underutilized and I have no idea why. Togs was such a huge help throughout all the aspects of the game, from review to modding. He was with me throughout every stage of the game and really helped with the design of the game. I personally believe that games can be improved doublefold if people had a reliable, competent co-mod that was passionate about the game and the design.
Finally, I'd like to thank ZDS and all the people who replaced in (Huntzilla, Necarg). As I'm sure you can observe in the review QT, ZDS was a god tier reviewer and he helped us so much when we were designing the game. There would be a lot more problems with the setup if ZDS wasn't there to help us out. We surprisingly got very little replace outs, which is rare for a game of this caliber. I'm very happy that many of you decided to stick it out, and we hope that you guys had as much fun playing the game as we had designing it.