Mod Effort?

[Zindaras]

Flavour's something you don't notice until it's not there anymore.

I like flavour. I like to read a little background story about the character I'm playing as. I like reading DPs and OPs. They bring a smile to my face, like they did in Lights Out 2.

[Zindaras]

Ok, well this game is a theme game, so it'll have flavor, and the roles will fit the characters. I'm just not sure if it's worth writing a paragraph to go with the role.

It's the difference between:

a) You are Glork. Due to your awesomeness, you are a cop.

and

b) OMGZORZ! You are teh Glrok! No one doubts your awesomeness, although your scumhunting statistics are debated among many. As such, you are given a chance to prove yourself to the scum community. Each night, you may choose someone and find out if they are, in fact, scum. However, you must have voted them at least once during the previous day, to show that you actually suspected them. You win with all threats to your complete and utter awesomeness have been eliminated.

I'd take b over a any day,

especially

if we're talking about an unknown or a not very well-known subject. I like reading a little background story, I like detailed roles.

One thing to be careful about; the more complicated the role PM's are, the more likely town will attempt to use that to it's advantage. At some point that starts being part of a balance issue.

Only possible if there's a distinctive thing tying all town PMs together. If all the PMs are worded in the same way, no metagaming's going to help, because Mafia can fake a PM just as easily as a townie.

[Zindaras]

I claim that in a game where PM's look like the second version of the Glork PM's, it's much harder to make up a good fake claim. Basically, the point is that now I need to be able to imitate the writing style of the player in question, and figure out what would be a reasonable story from him.

Let me put it this way; if a mod gave you a one shot ability to force him to write a fake role PM for you to use, you'd definately use it in the second game, and wonder what the hell the mod was thinking in the first game.

Flavour's part of the game. Sure, you'll have to think up a more expansive story for your little fake claim, but that's pretty much it. Also, I wouldn't let the mod write a fake role PM. I don't like fake claims to begin with. It takes away so much of the tension and fun of fake claiming. It's fun to think of a perfect claim yourself.

Where there is more than one of a certain role (townie being most likely), you could just write a different PM or flavour for each townie, negating the usefulness of any flavour claims or wordcount claims, etc.

You could also scatter different role names through your vanilla set so that one may be a townie, another a townsperson, another a villager, etc. I believe some mods already do this in some games.

If I have a basic vanilla role PM a lot of people get, it'll be in the first post.