I am opinionated about modding

[pieguyn]

if you're allowing hydras (or even if you're not bc people might slip a hydra from outside into your game), make it absolutely clear whether votes from an incorrect account, actions from an incorrect account, or anything along those lines count or not instead of just saying "if it looks like a vote i count it". regardless of what your policy is, it eliminates any potential for "i thought X vote counted and it didn't count" situations which could severely affect the gamestate.

i'm also pretty strongly in favor of giving players basic setup-related information, i.e. specifying whether a game is multiball or not, and in another instance i specifically pointed out that the assignment of flavor to alignment was random so that players wouldn't bother to speculate over it. i don't really get arguments for not doing this because in most cases it just prevents players from wasting their time speculating over irrelevant shit and allows them to focus more on pure scum hunting. it's a practice i prefer when i'm actually playing, anyway

[pieguyn]

i don't necessarily agree with always getting multiple reviewers, but that might be because all of the games i've ran have been based on obscure shit no one knows about so it's almost impossible for me to find more than 1 or maybe 2 reviewers most of the time. both mini theme games i've ran or co-ran have been fine despite only having 1 reviewer each whereas every large (normal/theme) game i've ran has been critiqued for its balance one way or another regardless of how many people reviewed it.

i might just be lazy? /shrug

[pieguyn]

As to multi ball, do those kind of setups still commonly appear? I don't understand the need for disclosure of multi ball in a large game as it's something that should reasonably be expected in a large game, but I might agree with disclosure in a mini game because it isn't reasonably expected there.

about multiball in particular, i don't really announce it based around whether it should be reasonably expected or not. i do it because i imagine players don't enjoy having to spend a bunch of time going "is this multiball" or "is that a multiball kill or an SK kill or a vig kill" or "are there flavor reasons for spec'ing multiball here" or having to reset all of their reads because they think the game is multiball when they didn't before or any other similar behavior which results from not knowing whether the game is multiball or not. that is, regardless of whether it's a part of the game that should in theory be expected, guessing about multiball is not a part of the game i find enjoyable at all

i don't know how many other people agree with me on this, but i do get the general impression most people prefer not having to think about it

[pieguyn]

there are other ways to enforce speculation about a setup that aren't as much of a total crapshoot as "durr is the game multiball or not".

i've actually done it indirectly in my last two theme games. in the first, i had a full vigilante, with no restrictions, which is a really awful-looking role which leaves open the possibility for an SK. the second was role madness, and me/my co-mod included several awful-looking town roles and town-looking scum roles. i could be wrong but i am pretty sure both had the intended effects, especially in the second game (in general people kept trying to outguess the setup and losing, as opposed to reading play).

playing around with setup spec can be a good thing to do sometimes. but i don't think that having to blindly wonder if a game is multiball or not is the kind of setup spec people enjoy actually doing when they're in a game. (+ some aspects of the setup, i.e. flavor, shouldn't be speculated on at all.)

[pieguyn]

I've found in practice, the issue with that is that by the time you figure it out "naturally" you've basically lost all control over whether you can win the game or not, for a lot of reasons (1. in multiball it's very easy for scum to legitimately scum hunt, and town has no way of distinguishing this from town scum hunting unless they know the game is multiball; 2. if you get unlucky with crosskills, and the setup isn't balanced well, which happens almost all the time with multiball setups, it sometimes only takes 2 or 3 mislynches before you're completely suffocated; etc.). but, I don't wanna turn this into a debate about the merits of multiball setup-wise.