Future WW Games

[Clem J]

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Thread 'CWWem's Poorly DWWawn Mafia Game (signups)'

Yesterday at 7:01 PM

It's a mafia game, I'll edit the details in here tonight

D1 start on January 1, cycle changes at 2pm pacific probably

24/24 with a hammer

Low mech, events that do stuff

Dead and/or tot chat mechanics probably

Claim anything you want. Ties determined by the mafia.

I don't use subs, if you need to leave the game that's fine! Your slot will just be modkilled instead of subbed.

Rules stuff I copy/pasted from last game:

• No post minimum
• Phases are 24/24, thread is open at night by default
• The vote is determined by whoever has the most votes at vote close. There are...

• Clem J
• Replies: 81
• Forum: Pre-Veterinary

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Signups open, details to come

 

[GoSpursGo]

To elaborate on this a bit

Basic balance is pretty easy--you just count how many miskills town can make before losing and base number of scum on that. Good rule of thumb is that 3 or 4 miskills should lose the game (for these purposes assume a successful NK every night). So in an 11 player game that's 2 or 3 mafia (9v2>7v2>5v2>3v2>Loss = 4 miskills to lose...8v3>6v3>4v3>Loss = 3 miskills to lose). 2 miskills losing as a base is a really tight margin and should be reserved for sites with an exceptionally strong town meta--so not SDN, in other words.

So that's your basic starting point, then you start doing roles--mostly you balance roles against each other rather than against town:mafia ratio, but you can compensate a bit with one more or one fewer mafia. Roles are a lot more feel-based for balance, but a few good things to keep in mind:

Cop, watcher, and jailer roles (or functionally similar) tend to be the strongest ones and require careful implementation and/or some kind of gating (i.e., limited number of shots, or some other modfier (like a parity cop for example). Vig should be considered when determining town:scum ratio because it's an additional source of death, but it will statistically hit town more often than scum--that doesn't make it bad for town, but it is relevant for balancing purposes.

Roles that remove a player's agency completely tend to not be that fun in practice--stuff that messes with votes, for example, is very very finicky and can be frustrating and demoralizing for the players involved. Same with stuff that removes the ability to talk (post restrictions are different but still have to be careful with them). They're not a hard line inherently bad, but they're much harder to make work effectively.

One potentially useful way to design games is to think of mech as a puzzle--one of the best pieces of advice I've seen was a GM who said they design their mech as a puzzle for the mafia to figure out. I try to apply that same approach--mech is a puzzle for both alignments to figure out, and doing so should ideally give them an advantage without outright winning the game. Mech is an inherent part of the game, but it should ideally exist in concert with the vote rather than in opposition to it.

Hopefully some of that is helpful xD

This is super helpful!

Can you expound on the voting bit? Do you generally just mean that losing your vote is not fun, or is granting players an extra voting power also generally unfun? Asking because several of my ideas tend to revolve around the voting mechanics (I think you saw me try and propose an effect that tinkered with voting power in the hoWWiday game, and you laughed me right out the door )

Also a lot of the mech balancing just comes from trial and error and getting a feel for it, both in general and for the specific site you're running games on

I'm sure this is true--I'm excited to give it a go, and maybe I'll sneak a couple of nonstandard mechanics into the game 🙂

 

[Clem J]

This is super helpful!

Can you expound on the voting bit? Do you generally just mean that losing your vote is not fun, or is granting players an extra voting power also generally unfun? Asking because several of my ideas tend to revolve around the voting mechanics (I think you saw me try and propose an effect that tinkered with voting power in the hoWWiday game, and you laughed me right out the door )


I'm sure this is true--I'm excited to give it a go, and maybe I'll sneak a couple of nonstandard mechanics into the game 🙂

Yeah, the day vote is typically town's strongest tool, collectively, so anything that messes with it should be approached with extra care. So mechanics that mess with the vote are very touchy--generally adding a vote is better than removing one, but you do mostly want the person who got the most votes to be the person who dies. If that's not the case you do usually want it to be something that can be solved for why, so that town is still getting *something* from it.

 

[SkiOtter]

I'm frozen.

Appropriate for our weather tomorrow

 

[Animal Midwife]

Appropriate for our weather tomorrow

Unfortunately, I have to dredge it out for my piano lesson but maybe I'll come back home to some pizza since it's also my brother's birthday.