Re: Tales of Desolation mafia Engame
Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 5:23 am
Make me a death masoning vig again and I'll kill Bessie first every time.
Press F for the old forum.
https://ramenchef.nfshost.com/nxf/
All my scum reads I was very unsure on and so I began looking at players I had a null read and Madge flagged the most. Really it was that Miller claim that I thought scum Madge would definitely make.
Firstly, to clarify the flavor implementation and how I handle hypotheticals, that was all me. So I bear all responsibility for this.boomfrog wrote: ↑Mon Feb 24, 2025 10:41 pm @Seven, Adum and Cemetables, thank you so much for the work you put into the game. The flavor was incredibly detailed and rich, the fakeouts were heart-wrenching, and the mechanical design was very well done. I like how you made the roles both less powerful than most standard roles and also more interesting.
That said, here's the middle of the compliment sandwich. I think you guys are open to feedback and constructive criticism, so my apologies if this is presumptuous. I think the way wam and Bop got caught was unfun. The game would have been a better experience if town had to decide if they were scum on the merits of their actions, tone and tells. I know this sort of thing can't be always avoided but I think there are reasons that it happened twice in one game. Part of it is that it is harder to generate a good fake claim in a game where the mod has put more personal touches on a game, and this game was personalized to a wonderful degree. But that made it almost impossible for any player to mimic the mods style of role design. But I think the following advice applies to all games.
Imo, scum should always be given a full fake claim. They should receive an entire role PM with every detail that would be included in a real role PM. And the fake claims should be such that if everyone full claimed D1 there would be no hint at all to which claims were fake. This prevents scum from being outed in an "unfun" way.
Personally the way I like to ensure the second part is to literally design a town role for each player. Then randomly role for which town roles are fake, then design scum roles that have those fake claims. I can tweak the scum roles power based on how the towns power level was affected by which roles are missing. But this isn't a prescription, there's other ways to achieve the two principles I laid out.
I hope that advice is useful, and I really hope you run another game when you are recharged after this one. It was a blast.
Ya, I get it with the flavor mattering and the hypotheticals. The former, I just didn't realize how many people were flavor blind. The latter, I was hoping people would just get used to asking the kinds of specific questions. I do think that the Bop thing was a product of just not being used to the forum culture because I think a chance based role would raise eyebrows from almost everyone here.madge wrote: ↑Mon Feb 24, 2025 10:57 pm I think part of the way Bop got caught was the very free attitude about answering hypothetical questions, which also affected me and wam. Like, if hypotheticals weren't answered than Bop wouldn't have slipped up. And me and Wam had to spend a lot of time coming up with hypothetical questions about which fake names worked best with our fake claims, etc. It meant to an extent we could only scheme when Adumb was online.
I keep going back to hating how the flavour mattered so much - I had to work out if Maotelus was more or less likely to be a miller JOAT than Edna or whatever - because I think it's a missed opportunity. If the flavour had been something else, then me and Wam would have had an easier time of it. Like, I know enough about the lore of The Simpsons or The Wizard Of Oz (film) that I could be confident about the repercussions of different claims.
I think Boomfrog raises a great point, of having full fakeclaims. It means that scum still have the ability to come up with something completely different if they're backed in a corner, but they have a claim they can work towards. As scum I come up with my likely fakeclaim D1 and play to it all game.
I gotta say the little town Madge in my brain was a bit concerned about the massclaim of alignments, it seems to me like there wasn't a reason for town not to claim? I assumed there was someone out there who could do something nefarious with the information (even if it's just "you win when only shepherd aligned people are alive"). You might say it's no different than a lie-detector-paranoia-induced "I am town" soundoff but it's very different because, as demonstrated by wam, scum didn't know the "correct" answer the same way that scum knows that "I am town" is the correct answer in the former case.
I think the fact we ended up in the venn diagram with "people aren't familiar with the flavour" and "people don't have a reliable way to fake claim" is what caused the problem.
I would love to see this game played with a full complement of players who love the flavour. I can tell they'd have a wonderful time!
That’s actually how I generally go about my closed games with flavor. I think Adum’s decision to provide scum with several options was wise for this particular setup, however, to allow scum greater flexibility in their claims. As mentioned, though I think it would be apt to have the Game + Calamity/Shepard alignment mentioned with them. Like mini role PMs. That being said, I do think Wam being caught was more due to he and Madge being very busy. I suspect they would have come up with a better claim for Wam had they had more time to think about it.boomfrog wrote: ↑Mon Feb 24, 2025 10:41 pm Imo, scum should always be given a full fake claim. They should receive an entire role PM with every detail that would be included in a real role PM. And the fake claims should be such that if everyone full claimed D1 there would be no hint at all to which claims were fake. This prevents scum from being outed in an "unfun" way.
Personally the way I like to ensure the second part is to literally design a town role for each player. Then randomly role for which town roles are fake, then design scum roles that have those fake claims. I can tweak the scum roles power based on how the towns power level was affected by which roles are missing. But this isn't a prescription, there's other ways to achieve the two principles I laid out.