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GAF MAFIA |OT| Season 4 Review Thread | "YES, SOMEHOW I AM THE PROBLEM HERE"

Sorian

Banned
It's more of a 2 + 0 + .2 + .6 game
(That was a joke, yes, a .5 game)

I'm staying spoiler free on yours for now on purpose as well. If I should happen to be selected for a main season game runner then I would only be able to play in a .5 game since the main season game runners all look over each other's games.
 
I guess, I'll post my thoughts, too. Note: I have not yet read anything about Woof, I just followed HP and NV.

- Nightvale balance: Some people are saying "just" adding one more Vanilla Scum would have made it fine. I agree, but it's not a "just". Due to their low numbers, one scum more or less makes a huge difference. NV basically had 3.5 Scum members in a 23 player game, none of them with especially powerful roles and a Town stacked with blowouts like Coppa's NK denier, an unkillable SK that has to kill at least one scum (Remember: One down is a HUGE loss for scum because they are so few) and TL's double lynch. You either had to power up Scum significantly or make it 4.5 Scum.

- HP balance: I honestly thought it was fine. Scum got unlucky, but that's life. The fact that Hyper in the spectator thread already had the game already booked as a scum win during the last Night is an indicator that the game is incredibly swingy but not actual unbalanced. But I'm not sure you can eliminate swingyness in a bastardy game.

- Night Start: I don't know how this affected D1 in WW, but I dislike it. 1. It completely sucks for the poor guy that is NKd (Could be compensated by having a daystart game start a bit later with a reserved slot for that player). 2. All choices made that night are in best case completely random and in worst case completely based on Meta. 3. Because of this I don't see how a dead body on D1 is of any bigger non-meta discussion value. In certain cases I could see the point in a partial Night start with some roles disabled, e.g. anything that kills or directly investigates.

- Investigative Roles: I find it very hard to judge them correctly. How many distractions are there (Miller, Godfather, ...)? How straightforward is their result? How easy is it for them to operate as an investigative role? Is there even a role that isn't intended to be a straight investigative role but can be abused as one (I think I found at least one case of this in a more exotic role I wanted to incorporate somewhere)? All these questions are quite circumstantial but their answer is crucial for balancing the game. As a rule of thumb, I think there should be not more than one strong and one weak investigative role in a typical main season setup unless we're going to high values in the crab scale and Scum has enough ways to deal with them.

- Process of choosing games: I really like the idea that very mod has to make a mid season game first before being allowed to moderate a main season game. But that also would call for at least 3-4 mid season games per Season to not have always the same game runners. We also should have some council of very experienced game runners two look over and mentor each main season game and then maybe rank them on how good they think it's fleshed out. Then just take the top 3 of that list and run them for main season. If multiple games are similar well made, new Game Runners should get priority. From that final roaster, players than can list them in their preference order and then get put into the games according to this.

- High Crab scale games: I don't think making these Veterans only is a good idea. In fact, I like it even less than banning them completely from main season. I don't know how you all felt about S3 but I liked the setup of games we had there and 2 of them were pretty unusual. I think the repulsion that can be seen here is just the result of HP going a bit too far. But I'd have no problem with 3 Cthulhus or DRs in one season...

- Mod Teams: I never ran a game myself, but i like the idea of having a mod team, preferably from different timezones so you don't have to wake someone up when something unexpected happens.
 

Sorian

Banned
- HP balance: I honestly thought it was fine. Scum got unlucky, but that's life. The fact that Hyper in the spectator thread already had the game already booked as a scum win during the last Night is an indicator that the game is incredibly swingy but not actual unbalanced. But I'm not sure you can eliminate swingyness in a bastardy game.


- Mod Teams: I never ran a game myself, but i like the idea of having a mod team, preferably from different timezones so you don't have to wake someone up when something unexpected happens.

I think the secret win condition was really what hurt HP balance a lot. Hyper did think he had the game in the bag awhile back and the horcrux thing didn't become the exact issue anyway but that being sprung on them hurt morale and it shouldn't have been a secret to them.

Mod teams are good (I say this but I want to run my game solo but I also know that I'm insane and around all the time.
You're all my only friends ;_;
) and the main season games kind of have this automatically since the mods all know each other's games and discuss with each other.
 

RetroMG

Member
Suggestion for future mods - Get Google Hangouts, or use some kind of chat program where all of you can chat in one place quickly and easily, on PC and phone. For S4, we used Google Hangouts, and it made life SO much easier, because we could quickly discuss issues as they arose.

If you don't like Google Hangouts, here's a great thread for you.

Mod teams are good (I say this but I want to run my game solo but I also know that I'm insane and around all the time.
You're all my only friends ;_;
) and the main season games kind of have this automatically since the mods all know each other's games and discuss with each other.

I would seriously suggest at least finding someone who can be a backup for you if needed. Yes, the mod group works well, but have someone clearly ready. I'm available, if you would like. (Been debating whether or not to read your game anyway.)
 
Number of player slots for the game: 15-20
People who have been told about, consulted, or hinted information about your set-up: Various people
Theme: Town Of Salem
Game Category: Depending on how much shenanigans the higher-ups will allow, probably 8-11
 

Sorian

Banned
Suggestion for future mods - Get Google Hangouts, or use some kind of chat program where all of you can chat in one place quickly and easily, on PC and phone. For S4, we used Google Hangouts, and it made life SO much easier, because we could quickly discuss issues as they arose.

If you don't like Google Hangouts, here's a great thread for you.



I would seriously suggest at least finding someone who can be a backup for you if needed. Yes, the mod group works well, but have someone clearly ready. I'm available, if you would like. (Been debating whether or not to read your game anyway.)

Don't worry, I'll pull someone from the people that end up reviewing me. Again, I always urge, don't spoil yourself if you have any desire to play.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
WW 2 Game time! Here's the spreadsheet of roles, as a reminder: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...sgpE8jmJ2qLVrCXvFwaNGXcic/edit#gid=1110874861

Also totally ignoring how or why WW Game 2 came to be. Valid or not, that's just excuses.

First, I'll cover what actually happened. Overall, despite the way the game ended, it clearly ended up favoring Werewolves overall, and they should have won N5. Day 5 started 6v8, and scum posessed a double vote which meant town was in LYLO. What scum tried to do was bus their Wolf Pup, while keeping Sheriff on scum. Then, they just had to kill any player, in addition to Rats(a hunter), then Makai would have controlled her action to force him to kill a third town player. Next Day starts 5v5 and scum wins. The problem is that scum somehow glossed over Czartim's Hider role claim and targeted him with Rats, meaning they failed one kill. That still should have left the game 5v6, which would effectively end the game due to the extra sheriff vote they controlled. However, the only person who had not claimed happened to be a backup doctor who guessed correctly and protected a second kill. Now the day starts 5v7, but town knows who ever single scum is due to the way they bussed Crimsonfist. The game was effectively over but I had to let it keep going in case anyone decided to go nuts. You all saw the results of that. Essentially, it stopped being a proper game of Werewolf when Day 5 ended. Nothing after that really counts for much, though I do wonder if I should have called it sooner.

For Day 1-4, the biggest town issue seemed to be inactivity. I'm not here to assign any blame for that, and some of it seems to be my fault as discussed previously. It's just a fact that there was a lot of inactivity. Even aside from that, Town cannibalized it's own players pretty rapidly. Day 1-4, there was only a single vote on the scum team when a day ended. Town players suiciding really hurt. Town players roleclaiming when they didn't need to, also hurt. The Sleepwalkers and the Lookout lost all utility once they role claimed. I generally feel like Town played badly overall, which exacerbated some balance issues.

Town!

When I made this version of the game, my thought was I'd include more killy roles, but also give town more ways to mitigate it. Thus a doc, backup doc, neutral CPR doc, witch,1 shot BP, and Hider. I'll come back to the CPR doc in a bit. There's nothing here I would specifically change, in hindsight.

I also didn't want town to have too much investigative power, cause that's kinda easy-mode and I dislike it. So there are no direct cops at all, and of the 4 investigative roles(Tracker, Lookout, Hider, Voyeur), 3 have built in limitations, and all 4 had counters on scum team and their own team. The Celebrity and Sheriff falls into this category somewhat as being confirmed town when needed. If I changed anything here, it would be turning the Celebrity into a normal townie. I liked Sheriff and will talk about him separately.

To make up for scum numbers and neutrals, town had access to 5 total kills. Witch and Hunter each had a 1 shot, and the Vig had 3-shot. I balanced Vig by making them Macho, so they could not be protected. I didn't want them to be able to claim, get targets from town, and be protected by doc while doing it. Between these killers, town could cause up to 3 deaths in a single night, and 5 throughout the game. I would probably get rid of the Witch 1-shot if I was going to change anything here. Overall, I think the Macho 3-shot Vig and Hunter were fine.

Sleepwalkers! For negative interactions, they were intended to confuse both trackers, and possibly the warlock. For positive interactions, the lookout could have used the info from them visiting to get extra info. They also would not really have thrown the Voyeur off at all. I was surprised to hear people call them negative utility. To me, they're scum bait. I also had 3 of these, and two trackers to make some role claims a little sketchier.

Ordinary Townies! Nothing to say other than I should have had more of them. I'd probably turn 1 neutral into one, the Celebrity into one, and I'm not sure beyond that.

Scum Team!

For scum, I wanted them to have numbers and mostly decent roles to balance the amount of kills. They had no real self protection at all.

The scum tracker is a tracker. He's there to try and catch power roles. There were risks to using it or claiming it. Wouldn't change this.

The Strongman and Ninja(and Macho and Hider) were there partly to introduce the idea of role modifiers to GAF. The strongman was meant as a counter for the Lookout, and 3 doctors. His downside is the Voyeur/tracker could(and did) catch him, he couldn't hit the Hider, and I would let the Witch revive his kill as well. The ninja would obviously dodge all of the investigations, but couldn't counter the protections or Hider either, and sometimes the lack of information is information in and of itself. Problem was making them both 3 shot. I should have made them 2 shot so scum would be more picky about it's usage. I still liked the general idea though.

Wolf Cub was just a Wolf Cub. Only real trick is that scum wouldn't want to use him for the kills like usual, because they'd want to use Strongman and Ninja instead. Just love this role for some reason.

Dream Wolf was there to mess with the investigative roles as well. His sleepwalking could have cleared him early only for him to start killing later, or it could have led to his lynch if he was particularly unlucky. I think the sleepwalking on a wolf made him slightly worse than a normal wolf goon so I was using that to balance a little. Probably wouldn't change

The Warlock is one of two roles I basically made up. The idea came from the wtich in ToS that can control someones actions. That seemed a bit too bastard, so I basically made it so he could only do it every other night, and the target would know their action was redirected so it wasn't too bastard. It was a bit too fiddly and could have been swingy, so I'd probably change this back to being an ordinary wolf or something else.

The infamous Neutrals!

CPR Doc was awesome and anyone that disagrees is basically a bad person. More seriously though, I thought it was a fun way to give town some potential protection, while also possibly causing a lot of confusing interactions. Warlock could have controlled it, seen it protects, and then killed a teammate with it on mistake. Trackers could have seen it "protect" someone, then wonder why the person died anyway(cause the strongman?) . He had to save 3 lives to win. I might change it's win condition a bit so that killing 3 people causes him to lose immediately as well. I thought this role had a pretty solid chance at winning, though it would be in an awkward spot if it ever had to role claim due to the other 2 doctors. Overall, this should be a fairly pro-town neutral.

Doppleganger was too swingy and I would get rid of it for sure. Statistically, I figured it would end up as a town role, but in that case, I should have just made it a Universal Backup for town. It erased the only good thing town accomplished in the first 4 days, and pushed them 1 day closer to LYLO. This was also me fucking up by warping rules to fit the fluff.

Gossip Arsonist. It was fun, but probably the biggest mistake for a few reasons. The idea was KK would have a few town and scum and blow them all up, maintaining some semblance of status quo, but shortening the game by a few phases. The reality is that he should play it like a normal Gossip to avoid arousing any suspicion, and a normal Gossip only wants to invite townies. Unlike a normal gossip, he was hoping to get ordinaries who wouldn't get killed by others., but it still went 100% anti-town which i quite stupidly did not see coming. It also did not really have any counters, nor way for anyone to find out about, or even prevent it other than simply killing him. I think the general idea could be reworked and balanced around, but my implementation was bad. It put town several days closer to LYLO than they should have been.

So overall, removing the Gossip Arsonist and Doppleganger would have pushed LYLO back by 6 days, which is a huge difference. With the player count, I'd probably keep one of them a neutral of some type, and turn the other into another ordinary townie. That alone would probably fix the balance a good bit. Do note that this game was meant to be balanced in favor of a Wolf win since Town has been too successful overall.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
Suggestion for future mods - Get Google Hangouts, or use some kind of chat program where all of you can chat in one place quickly and easily, on PC and phone. For S4, we used Google Hangouts, and it made life SO much easier, because we could quickly discuss issues as they arose.

If you don't like Google Hangouts, here's a great thread for you.



I would seriously suggest at least finding someone who can be a backup for you if needed. Yes, the mod group works well, but have someone clearly ready. I'm available, if you would like. (Been debating whether or not to read your game anyway.)

Yes, Hangouts helped immensely. Though probably mute your notifications or we will blow your shit up talking about some inane crap at some godawful european hours.

Is it bedtime? Better mute the app unless I want to talk about Gorillas and HR problems, dick pics, and tacos at 3am.
 

RetroMG

Member
Yes, Hangouts helped immensely. Though probably mute your notifications or we will blow your shit up talking about some inane crap at some godawful european hours.

Is it bedtime? Better mute the app unless I want to talk about Gorillas and HR problems, dick pics, and tacos at 3am.

This is truth. Mute notification, or your phone will go insane. But it's an amazing time, and I loved reading what insanity had gone on while I was asleep.
 

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
Hangouts is trash.

Use IRC like proper wizened board game players.
 

RetroMG

Member
I'm still sad that we had to lose the WW1 Jailor for WW2. That was a great role, and I was really excited about how it was working.

Hangouts is trash.

Use IRC like proper wizened board game players.

The only complaint I had about hangouts was that whenever someone joined in, we had to start a new hangout. We have like six going right now, with different people in them.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
Hangouts is trash.

Use IRC like proper wizened board game players.

but hangouts works cross platform quite nicely for us!. It was really just simplest thing at the time since we mostly use google to hos the spreadsheets and documents.

I'm not opposed to other solutions.
 

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
I think it's legitimately worse than Buzz as a service because at least no one used Buzz so dropping it was no big deal. My friends are all on Google/Hangouts so I have to use the shitty thing because it's unreasonable to ask everyone else to switch.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
I think it's legitimately worse than Buzz as a service because at least no one used Buzz so dropping it was no big deal. My friends are all on Google/Hangouts so I have to use the shitty thing because it's unreasonable to ask everyone else to switch.

I don't know what Buzz is.
 

ultron87

Member
CPR Doc was awesome and anyone that disagrees is basically a bad person. More seriously though, I thought it was a fun way to give town some potential protection, while also possibly causing a lot of confusing interactions. Warlock could have controlled it, seen it protects, and then killed a teammate with it on mistake. Trackers could have seen it "protect" someone, then wonder why the person died anyway(cause the strongman?) . He had to save 3 lives to win. I might change it's win condition a bit so that killing 3 people causes him to lose immediately as well. I thought this role had a pretty solid chance at winning, though it would be in an awkward spot if it ever had to role claim due to the other 2 doctors. Overall, this should be a fairly pro-town neutral.

When you praise a thing for causing confusing interactions I don't think it is actually a good thing. It's funny and interesting from the designer and spectator's perspectives if the Warlock controls the action and kills a teammate but that's crappy for everyone else involved. No one knows what happened and basically won't be able to until after the game ends. This game already has so much inherent hidden information and randomness that adding another layer of unknown just in case someone actually manages to figure something out seems really bad to me.

Edit: To expand, I feel like there shouldn't be designer traps in the game. Like with the Sheriff that was setting up the obvious "wine in front of me" scenario between the Doctor and the Scum. Would the doctor protect the obvious target? Would the scum risk targeting the sheriff and getting their kill blocked? What if the scum have a tracker? Ooooh. Interesting decisions! But it doesn't actually matter because the scum have a strongman so of course they'll kill the sheriff. So now the Doctor is almost certainly going to get rekt and not even save someone.
 

Sorian

Banned
When you praise a thing for causing confusing interactions I don't think it is actually a good thing. It's funny and interesting from the designer and spectator's perspectives if the Warlock controls the action and kills a teammate but that's crappy for everyone else involved. No one knows what happened and basically won't be able to until after the game ends. This game already has so much inherent hidden information and randomness that adding another layer of unknown just in case someone actually manages to figure something out seems really bad to me.

Edit: To expand, I feel like there shouldn't be designer traps in the game. Like with the Sheriff that was setting up the obvious "wine in front of me" scenario between the Doctor and the Scum. Would the doctor protect the obvious target? Would the scum risk targeting the sheriff and getting their kill blocked? What if the scum have a tracker? Ooooh. Interesting decisions! But it doesn't actually matter because the scum have a strongman so of course they'll kill the sheriff. So now the Doctor is almost certainly going to get rekt and not even save someone.

I fundamentally disagree, in all honesty, the sheriff and CPR doc were probably two of the best things I saw in the werewolf reborn game. CPR doc isn't even that odd, it's a regular variant of the doctor role. Also, the interesting scenario wasn't really in the doctor vs. scum on the sheriff, it was the strongman vs. potential watcher.

One thing I can say though, there was no scenario where the sheriff survived night 1 and that's a little sad. If the strongman didn't get him then likely the CPR doc would.
 

Sorian

Banned
CPR doctor is a great idea and would have been fine if we didn't also have the arsonist

^

The gossip was what made it too swingy. In the end, kingkitty played it good which involved only getting town members. The gossip arsonist was a scum-aligned neutral while the CPR doc was town aligned neutral but kingkitty was so much stronger in power than QB was.
 

ultron87

Member
When considering game balance you basically need to consider a CPR doctor like they're a vigilante/serial killer and not like they're someone that's actually going to save anyone the majority of the time.
 

CzarTim

Member
^

The gossip was what made it too swingy. In the end, kingkitty played it good which involved only getting town members. The gossip arsonist was a scum-aligned neutral while the CPR doc was town aligned neutral but kingkitty was so much stronger in power than QB was.
I wouldn't describe CPR doctor as pro town necessarily. If no one claimed there was a good chance our top posters would die in the first few nights which would have killed town momentum. It's still absolutely a role that should be lynched if discovered
 

Sorian

Banned
When considering game balance you basically need to consider a CPR doctor like they're a vigilante/serial killer and not like they're someone that's actually going to save anyone the majority of the time.

I think that was the case, Palmer really went in on the killers for this game.

I wouldn't describe CPR doctor as pro town necessarily. If no one claimed there was a good chance our top posters would die in the first few nights which would have killed town momentum. It's still absolutely a role that should be lynched if discovered

At the end of the day, the win condition was to protect people. The motivation is to be pro-town, that might not always be the execution though. A vigilante is trying to be pro-town too but is really just a glorified serial killer. That's where the strength of KK's role vs. QB's role became an issue. KK didn't have any risk to his role except for potentially trying to burn a bulletproof. QB's risk was that each time he screwed up, he moved the game as a whole closer to it's conclusion while he was on a strict timeframe.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
When you praise a thing for causing confusing interactions I don't think it is actually a good thing. It's funny and interesting from the designer and spectator's perspectives if the Warlock controls the action and kills a teammate but that's crappy for everyone else involved. No one knows what happened and basically won't be able to until after the game ends. This game already has so much inherent hidden information and randomness that adding another layer of unknown just in case someone actually manages to figure something out seems really bad to me.

Edit: To expand, I feel like there shouldn't be designer traps in the game. Like with the Sheriff that was setting up the obvious "wine in front of me" scenario between the Doctor and the Scum. Would the doctor protect the obvious target? Would the scum risk targeting the sheriff and getting their kill blocked? What if the scum have a tracker? Ooooh. Interesting decisions! But it doesn't actually matter because the scum have a strongman so of course they'll kill the sheriff. So now the Doctor is almost certainly going to get rekt and not even save someone.

I'll probably never be a fan of perfect information. It's why I don't like a Cop in most games. If you catch someone killing someone, there should always be a chance it's not quite what it appears. Misinformation is just another balancing tool.
 

CzarTim

Member
I think that was the case, Palmer really went in on the killers for this game.



At the end of the day, the win condition was to protect people. The motivation is to be pro-town, that might not always be the execution though. A vigilante is trying to be pro-town too but is really just a glorified serial killer. That's where the strength of KK's role vs. QB's role became an issue. KK didn't have any risk to his role except for potentially trying to burn a bulletproof. QB's risk was that each time he screwed up, he moved the game as a whole closer to it's conclusion while he was on a strict timeframe.
Vigs kill players town would lynch anyway, saving town a day. CPR doc is going to protect people town wants to stay around and if they're wrong lose a valuable townie in the process. The motivation is to guess the nk targets, which is not always pro-town. There would never be a scenario where I wouldn't l lynch a CPR doc immediately.
 

Sorian

Banned
Vigs kill players town would lynch anyway, saving town a day. CPR doc is going to protect people town wants to stay around and if they're wrong lose a valuable townie in the process. The motivation is to guess the nk targets, which is not always pro-town. There would never be a scenario where I wouldn't l lynch a CPR doc immediately.

Well yeah, once they are known, scum can control that really easily.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
Vigs kill players town would lynch anyway, saving town a day. CPR doc is going to protect people town wants to stay around and if they're wrong lose a valuable townie in the process. The motivation is to guess the nk targets, which is not always pro-town. There would never be a scenario where I wouldn't l lynch a CPR doc immediately.

You might be forgetting there was a real doc too. If real doc and cpr doc protected the same pro town player, they would live(aside from strong kills, but that's a different issue). A backup too, in case he went down fast.

Edit: Would you still lynch them if everything was the same, but he was a town CPR doc?

I guess in that situation the cpr doc should just play like a vig probably, though.

A neutral CPR doc that has accurately role claimed has lost most of it's value to town, for sure. I have no idea why QB claimed. I don't think a Neutral CPR doc should ever accurately claim.
 

CzarTim

Member
You might be forgetting there was a real doc too. If real doc and cpr doc protected the same pro town player, they would live(aside from strong kills, but that's a different issue). A backup too, in case he went down fast.
That doesn't change anything in my mind. Having fewer average nks would always be preferable to a save.
 

Sorian

Banned
A town CPR doc should just play as a vig, not worth the risk

That moment of confusion when the CPR doc goes to play as a vig and everyone wakes up in the morning and there were no deaths.

Edit: Which would be great for the CPR doc in terms of basically clearing someone as not scum, just would be funny.
 

roytheone

Member
I think the secret win condition was really what hurt HP balance a lot. Hyper did think he had the game in the bag awhile back and the horcrux thing didn't become the exact issue anyway but that being sprung on them hurt morale and it shouldn't have been a secret to them.
.

Honestly, I didn't mind the horcrux that much. I think the bigger problem was the Voldermort role. If we found him very soon, we would have gotten 3 kills per night, one of which was unblock-able, and we would have had the override, which would have made us ridiculously overpowered and probably would have completely destroyed town. I think us having very few powers that were not linked to voldy and town having a shitload of powers was a balance measure to that, but that meant that when town got lucky and found voldy very soon, the game became very imbalanced in favor of town. I think who would have found voldy first was waaaaay to important of a factor in this game, town getting lucky and finding voldermort extremely soon should have never had this much impact on the game (and vice versa, us finding him incredibly soon should also not have as much impact as i expect it would have had).
 
so keeping minutes, just cuz it's good to keep tracks on the general consensus:
  • combined dead thread is better
  • game running needs A LOT of support
  • gamerunners should be given space to end the day / start the day without rushing it
  • silence are expected from both players and spectators once day phases are ended
  • panel of overseers will determine which games are selected to run
  • once the games are selected, players will get to nominate their preferences
  • main season will cover the spectrum of normal, middling and crazy games
  • in-game behaviours should be treated as such. however, we do encourage for the aggressive playstyle to be toned a little down, and for the delicate players to toughen up a notch.
  • post restriction roles / style must be cleared by overseer before implemented
  • win (and loss) condition must be made clear
  • overseers will advise on what kind of fake claims must be provided
  • scum team should be allowed to put in the commands for inactive scum
  • IF rebooting, give the players a breathing room, and try to keep the player base the same


might have missed some points, but in general i think that's where we are at....

more feedbacks are always welcomed !
 

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
Grats on becoming a father Palmer.
 
Werewoof minus the Doppelganger and Arsonist would have been a really tight design, I think. The rest of the roles interacted with and balanced each other in pretty interesting ways. Honestly, the biggest thing that hurt us as Town was the addiction to claiming in the early going. There's nothing that bothers me more than an unnecessary role claim.

I really liked Palmer's zero tolerance for night talk. It's something I've tried not to engage in myself because it's really against the spirit of the game (I think I did it a couple times in early Cthulhu, but I was still new at this). Also, there was a role in Launch's GAFia game that could have been crippled by loose lips from dead players. I applaud you for your firm stance on this matter, Palmer.

Also, I agree with Crab about the 4/3 schedule with consistent start times. Being a college student with a part time job, it's nice to have a reliable game schedule, and it's especially nice when a game only runs on weekdays because I tend to be working all weekend (and weekends in this community tend to be less active in general).
 
That's actually an interesting idea. We should try to schedule games and possibly factor in people schedules and the game runners in setting up the games
 

squidyj

Member
Poisoning.
Everybody loves a good poisoning don't they? Food poisoning, strychnine poisoning, radiation poisoning. Poisonings are great, they're hot, they're in!
It's a huge disadvantage to run a game night first with no kill for mafia.
I would propose that at the very least mafia poisons a target instead of not getting a kill at all.

Under a poisoning a player gets to live the day phase, vote, and whatnot and then they die, having had a full Life day phase and were able to shar eth eresults of an investigation or whatever. This is still bad for scum because it is a confirmed town day 1 doing whatever they want but it's not as bad as completely missing a kill.
 
Also, I think Mafia should be informed if their roles are told to the person they acted on. Now, I really expect this only to be an issue with poisons from now on, bit it's useful to know

I felt like, with the target being informed, we started the game planning for certain scenarios, assuming something we should have been free to assume, only to be told we couldn't

Dammit czar had a really good phrase for this about the map last review thread
 

FluxWaveZ

Member
I think my only real input right now is that I'm really not fond of player inactivity. I don't know if there's much else that can be done aside from the "1 post per day" requirement, but there were a few players in WW2 that were practically absent from the conversation.

There's the emphasis that game runners will have a lot on their plate, but I also think it's important to note how much this game requires of someone. I remember how in WW1 I was getting scum read simply because I was posting a lot for my first game, and that was really weird.
 

Flame_AC

Member
This is more of a comment on HP I already mentioned in that thread, but I suppose it can apply to other games.

Try not to make the game revolve around power roles as much. In HP I got the pleasure of being an ordinary (never had a PR, signed up to the role madness to get one :/). This would normally be fine like it was in Cthulhu but it seemed like the roles of the Dumbledore gang were just so useful that they could do so much more then me. It made it feel like I was useless to the town as I'm never going to get anything interesting. The game moved at such a pace that ordinaries didn't really get a chance to be important.

Basically, don't make the Vanilla Townies too few, otherwise they feel useless. This is especially important in a role madness game, which I suppose is a bit of a catch 22...

Anyways, I enjoyed S4 a lot, though I haven't gotten to look at whatever happened with Palmer's game.
 
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