Prototype Trials #Ex0039R16-CWLu17-0A1 [Mafia Wins]

Well, Lux, I think I speak for most, if not all of us, that we appreciate all the effort you put into this. =D

I'm sorry my role caused you so much distress. :(

Still, while it, and others, could have dealt with some tweaking, I think you did a good job at balancing this out, even if it ended a bit one-sided. Sometimes, everything that can go wrong for a team, does go wrong (source: half of the teams I've been on).

But once again, thank you, Luxxie! <3 I look forward to the next game you deliver to us! =D

Nonsense, Luxxxiedear. The game wasn't a failure, it just ended up running a bit roughly in practice. This kind of thing happens. You can't really know how a role will play out in practice until you use it. I think it turned out Tiki's messages weren't quite believable enough? Or at least too easy to disbelieve. If he hadn't eventually used another one and come clean about his role I probably wouldn't have gone back on him in the end.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, even if I didn't die early the one time I actually wanted to. Thank you for hosting!

Post-game thoughts and intentions

Where to begin?

I set out with a specific goal to make this game very unusual in terms of how role claims would work out. I have noticed role claiming has become too strong of a meta-game, and so coupled with the fact that I was tasked with hosting a game on the fly, I decided to go with a theme of letting players pick a role they would want to play--rather than me trying to pick one for them--but with the catch that the role would be unusual. In other words, you could have doctors and alignment cop kind of roles on mafia, and framers and killing roles on town, and just everything would be crazy so no one would be able to say "Well my role is this, so I am obviously [alignment]." That was the rough idea, but I am allergic to letting things be simple, I guess.

So the roles started pouring in and, to my surprise, I had almost none of the standard roles. I had a massive amount of killing roles, information roles, and a lot of third-party roles. This was problematic. It was at this point that I also saw the combination of Vanilla/Cthulhu would be great for a Jekyll & Hyde for Kiyoko, and Five could do Beloved Princess/Post Restriction as a cute cryogenic freezing chamber role. So this meant I felt obligated to make roles that combined multiple submissions.

I started breaking down roles to their core components to determine what it was that drew someone to that role, and I started combining some submissions to make them round out better and fit the theme of the game. Quickly, a concept started to emerge. So let's break a few things down. I'll save the elephant in the room for last.

Items
This was a big one. I had a lot of roles with items, so I said, sure, let's do it. Blaire, Lucas, plotstickers, katagi, and chinomi all provided items to varying degrees. Each one had slightly similar mechanics in distribution. I knew I could not have so many killing roles in the game, so I tried to keep the flavor of the item in-check. Lucas' focused on information, Blaire's focused on screwing with people, katagi got the flavor of voodoo lady attached to hers, chinomi took the Santa role the full distance to making anything, and plotstickers, somewhat lamely, had a key on top of her jail. That one was the least inventive--my apologies.

Some of these, like Lucas and Blaire, had redirection and controlling effects, which then meant I had to make it so using the role wasn't frustrating as hell when you had little control. Items would always be passed at the end of night, meaning your actions that night were on the target you knew to own it. I then enacted different recovery and death interactions. I wasn't sure how I felt about items being kind of variable in terms of Blaire, for instance, being a town stunner and having limited control over who she could stun. I think it mostly worked out.

I then included Ninfia, plotstickers, and Aeiou as having some item interactions to up the ante. Ninfia could make more, plotstickers could learn who owned items (though people claimed them anyway? I guess), and Aeiou could redirect items to a small degree. I'd probably modify some things in the future, but overall I think this worked well.

Watchers and Information
Kiyoko could see people acting on her, as could ezzelin. Rasei had a lot of watcher interaction, as did Lucas. So did Aeiou in some capacity. I made an early decision that I did not want an alignment cop since it's one of my most detested roles, and I compensate for it by trying to give town innocent child--which I did--and a lot of information that could be compiled. I liked the dynamic of people talking about who visited them and what went down, and how if there were so many there'd be less opportunity to pick one out as mafia. Which I'll get to in a moment.

None of these... worked. 14/16 players had definitive actions they could perform, though 1-2 of those depending on some conditions. In the end, Kiyoko and ezzelin were rarely visited and I had to adjust both a tiny bit (drandahl's synergy with Kiyoko and ezzelin's ability being modified).

On top of this, I tried to dispense information across town in ways that it wouldn't be overwhelming to mafia if town got an early lead. Tiny was flavor cop, and I tried to write flavors to roughly hint at roles, but make some town sound scummy, and some mafia sound towny. I gave Rasei a lot of investigation, plot had some, Ninfia had some, chinomi had a fair amount, angel kind of had some, katagi had some, Blaire had some, so on and so forth. This was so spread out so if one town died, the rest of town still could work together to piece information through discussion. I wanted a big emphasis on discussion.

To minorly combat this, mafia could eavesdrop through Lucas, send fake messages through Dylan, and Tiki could shut down results on his target. Tiki was meant to also negate messaging, which I tried to dispense across katagi, angel, plotstickers, and so on. Messaging ended up basically never being utilized.

All in all, it's tough to tell where this went. I think overall information was spread decently. Town was a little too open and started getting shut down in some ways. I think mafia also played their cards really well and managed to hide from town, so good job there.

Stuns and jails
This was rough.

I love stuns and I love jails. Yes, they also have the downside of limiting town more than mafia if they keep hitting them. This is why I made a fair amount of town information spread to multiple people or be part of passives. There were a number of controlling effects, which meant I worried mafia might get shut out. I made it so failed/attempted kills would not show. I made jails be the only protect, and I made one of town's stuns not be the most reliable to perform. Overall, I think I was relatively okay with the distribution and variance. I gave mafia some conditional tools to deal with it and tried to balance town around it. In the end, did I miscalculate? I thought mafia might get stunned or jailed out of one more kill attempt, which didn't happen. I also made a small mistake of thinking Ninfia would pull the Orange Lever more than she did, so I should've valued her stuns/jails a lot lower, especially since she had no control over them.

Role claiming
This game was intentionally designed to be difficult to role claim. I gave mafia some surface-level claims through Kiyo and Lucas. Dylan's role was meant to be hard for him to claim as honestly, and Tiki. Let's skip Tiki for now.

Town was meant to have some rough claims. Sammiya, in particular, which we all saw what happened. ezzelin was meant to alert people of her by name via host, much like Tiki did and does, so the two of them would be talking points. There were a few others I cannot recall off the top of my head, but the short of it is: The game was designed for surface-level claims to not work in this game. So I guess that was a success.

Passives and Five
Five was rough. I wanted to give her an active role, so I made it be that she helped people with experiments. I tried to provide a good number of passives and similar that she could absorb. Unfortunately none of that basically ever happened, somehow. Maybe if I go back, I'd add some redirect passives, an actual paranoid gun owner like I planned (before I realized PGO + Fool + Beloved Princess + my plan for Innocent child... would swing the game hard if I was unlucky, thus why I got rid of it and gave a weak version to Kiyo... for... reasons I'll get to).

So while her active seemed useful, I actually did design the game to work around her. I should've just made her a body guard or worked in the lightning rod flavor some other way.

Vote Manipulation
Thus continues the trend of my vote manipulation roles never working. I included a number of vote/lynch related roles. Only one of them, Ninfia's, actually happened. Something is clearly not working in the design room for me with this category. I love vote contesting roles because they add a lot more emphasis onto the day phase and discussion--this is why katagi existed, as well as some roles like parts of dylan's, ezzelin's, angel's, Tiny's, chinomi's, and similar. Ah, well.

The Host is the Fool
Where do I begin...

If I could go back, Tiki would have been forced to die. He had to die. I did the math both if he lived and died and counted in all effects. I gave town a total of 4 ML, which happened. That said, even if town lynched a mafia--especially Kiyoko--they might have still lost on N5. I don't know where and how I went wrong with that, if I did. I spent hours going through every scenario and the math seemed okay. I guess part of the problem was in all of my math, I never once anticipated a situation where:

Sammiya was lynched, while Tiki was not, while Five was never killed, while ezz never got her effects off.

Literally that was the one situation I did not fully plan around because I was so certain most of those things would work properly. Design mistake.

I just thought for sure Tiki would appear so scummy with his role that... I tried to make it so he didn't instantly implode, but I tried to make it so he'd obviously have attention on himself of a negative variety. Something did not translate well. I should not have given him control over the messages he sent, I think, or just done something else to make him scummier. Or just not done Fool. Anyway.

I apologize to Tiki and mafia if it feels like I'm harping on this, but it's why I've been stressed out about the game for so long. I... built the game around the possibility Tiki might never be lynched, but then all secondary things to help town went wrong, too. Every form of pseudo-protection town had was either lynched, killed, or never activated,  and mafia never received controlling effect pressure like I anticipated. So this then meant mafia had a lynchproof and vigilante kill to make up for Tiki, and Tiki never died. Those were the only reasons I gave them those two effects. I was originally going to give Kiyoko and Lucas other effects, actually.

Either way, mafia won and rightfully deceived a lot of town. I guess my main worry comes down to if I missed something when I made all of these roles. Which is a given. I don't know. I'll let you guys decide if the setup was imbalanced.

Closing thoughts
I care a lot about design philosophy and game balance. I talk about it a lot. I have strong opinions. So naturally I'm going to fret a bit over how things went. I took a lot of inspiration from some other games that have been hosted here, and this game became one of my favorites in terms of flavor. I was really proud with the themes and ideas behind each role. It took a lot of work and maybe some were off the mark, but conceptually I tried to deliver on a fun, whacky, crazy ride of a game. I did learn quite a few new things on what works and what doesn't, and so I will try to make modifications for future games I host, if anyone is still interested after... whatever this is and was.

So in closing, thank you for playing. Mafia played rather well, and town gave it a good attempt. I'd definitely change some things if I ran this again, and I may re-use some concepts in the future. I still have my list of six roles I dislike, but I might need to find ways to implement some of the more pro-town ones because I can't tell if my dislike of alignment cop, revive, and similar are hurting town in terms of balance or if something else happened. Either way, thank you all for putting up with me. I hope the next round is fun.

Feel free to offer comments and feedback on the setup and roles or whatever if you want. It's my goal to deliver as best a game I can and earn player trust, and so communication is helpful in that capacity. Otherwise, thanks for playing and for reading this post-game breakdown.

I'll give stars and figure out eligible trophies tomorrow or the day after.

Thanks for the insight, Lux. Fun to read. =D

Though...for as proud as I was with my scheme that worked better than even I intended, sorry if it broke the game. :(

I actually had a similar thought though, about just taking away my ability to control the message. After all, my ability to choose is what allowed me to hide in plain sight. If I'd not been able to plan around it, it probably would have gone differently...and probably sillier, as I'd have to make up more and more excuses. XD If your concern was it would make it less fun for me...well, don't forget your target audience. I would have enjoyed the wacky, uncontrollable nature of that, too. =D

Lux, I get it that u care a lot about design and balance, but don't sweat too much about it. I have made many and much more serious mistakes as a host, and I kno it's hella stressful to deal with but we're all humans and friends here :-)

this game was as much of a crazy fucking ride as Snowball Bash Mafia ok.

I loved and had tons of fun with it, I'm sure my mafia friends did too (i would go in detail but it could get pretty nsfw tbh, and a large chunk of it consisted on my teammates being nerds and bULLIES), and I hope that town did too!



But yeah thanks for hosting, Lux!!! And thanks everyone for playing along ;w;

Congratulations on the win, mafia. And thank you for your hard work, Lux! You put so much time and effort into hosting. ;3;

I was wondering why no one was suspicious of Tiki, lol...

ahhh congrats mafia!! thanks so much lux for hosting such a lovely game, and all the time/effort/thought/blood/sweat/tears you put into it :') i'm sad i only got to write two songs before i died ffff but alas. i really loved my role and had fun!!

Thanks so much for hosting Lux! You put so much time and effort into this game and even if things didnt go as planned everyone still had fun(I hope lol) All the roles were really interesting and look at all the science we did

Earned by plotstickers

Guardian Angel
As a protective role, successfully save one town member from death.

Earned by Tinylightsflash

 Elementary, My Dear
As an investigative role, successfully investigate at least two mafia members.

Earned by drandahl and Tiki the Troll, honorary mention to Kiyoko and high seraph who already have it

The Perfect Crime
Win a game as mafia without losing a single mafia member.

Stats doc and sidebar stats updated. As usual, stats are only counted for main games and not minigames, and if I made a mistake anywhere please let me know.

Thank you for the game. I thought Kiyoko was mafia at the end, and had been planning on fos on her after rereading the thread, then something happen and I wasn't around. I'm sorry.

I did have fun, and really enjoyed my role.

Yay, an achievement! How fitting of Luna...

Grats on the achievement, Plottie. =D

Likewise, you murderer! (Who even sent in the NKs...)

It was almost exclusively Drandahl, though I think Kiyo did one or two.

And thank you! =D