For purposes of a "mafia setup" I will define mafia as an informed minority of two or more players vs. an uninformed majority. (with possibility for multiple informed minorities)
[GUIDE] Common Mistakes in Setup Making
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BBmolla Open Book
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[GUIDE] Common Mistakes in Setup Making
This is meant to be a basic guide to stop you from making the mistakes people make time and time again when making their first setups.
For purposes of a "mafia setup" I will define mafia as an informed minority of two or more players vs. an uninformed majority. (with possibility for multiple informed minorities)
Spoiler: Not Mafia via no Informed Minority or Uninformed Majority
Spoiler: Not Mafia via 1 scum
Spoiler: Jester/Cult
Spoiler: Mass Power Roles
Spoiler: Cop/Doc Combo
Spoiler: Setups Based On One Role
Spoiler: Unfun Mechanics
Spoiler: DoctrainLast edited by BBmolla on Wed Sep 02, 2020 7:50 pm, edited 11 times in total.@thesupertriomusical on Instagram, come see it if you’re in LA area, I wrote it!-
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mith Godfather
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Another common one: Too many named roles. Often the strategy in such a game is an immediate massclaim, which forces Mafia in a bad spot - either the named roles are confirmed, or the Mafia must counterclaim and put themselves in a 50-50 situation. While having the power roles out obviously makes them vulnerable to being killed, the EV gain from improving lynches is more significant, even before considering whether the outed power roles can further help the town by coordinating their abilities.-
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BBmolla Open Book
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This is probably the biggest problem that I see over and over again. It turns the value of a powerrole into a process-of-elimination device by way of claiming during the day, without fully utilising its night potential, which doesn't make for a fun game. A lot of open setups have been broken by massclaiming or partial claiming strategies.In post 1, mith wrote:Another common one: Too many named roles. Often the strategy in such a game is an immediate massclaim, which forces Mafia in a bad spot - either the named roles are confirmed, or the Mafia must counterclaim and put themselves in a 50-50 situation. While having the power roles out obviously makes them vulnerable to being killed, the EV gain from improving lynches is more significant, even before considering whether the outed power roles can further help the town by coordinating their abilities.
Some good ways to counter this problem is adding a higher ratio of VT's, make the setup variable (0 or 1 Trackers, 1-2 Doctors etc.), or add mechanics that disincentivise claiming on D1 (or at all), for example; the daykill mechanic in Masons and Mafia which allows scum to daykill a mason if they name one correctly.
Another design strategy to dodge the named role is to design a game based entirely around mechanics rather than roles, such as Double Day Unlimited, or to give each player the same role like Duck, Duck, Goose!.
And then sometimes the best design decision is start over again and not force inelegant tweaks onto a setup just for the sake of making it work.-
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Realeo Jack of All Trades
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Can this be stickied?"The debate on whether short multi postings or a long wall of post is good or not is like a debate on gun control--we would never understand each other and we have to make peace with it." -Realeo
I'm mabye a serious player, but I'm capable of joke. Ok?-
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MURDERCAT he/himSurvivorhe/him
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callforjudgement Microprocessor
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Excessive swing is, in my experience, a mistake that happens far more often in Closed games than Open games. (The usual cause is flooding the game with roles like Tracker that get much more powerful when there's only one scum left; trackers can get both innos and guilties when there's one scum, but only guilties when there are more.)
We should probably add "broken by circle-targeting" / "broken by pair-targeting" (these are much the same strategy) to the list at the start. Also, "broken by repeated no-lynch". Both of these are fairly common mistakes in making role-heavy Opens.scum· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·town-
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BBmolla Open Book
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BBmolla Open Book
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Thoughts on some unfun mechanics?
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Plotinus Kitten Caboodle
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governors that aren't limited to 1-shot with 48 hour twilight
edit: really long twilights, mechanics that make stalling the game out to a no lynch be a viable tactical for either alignmentLast edited by Plotinus on Sat Jul 02, 2016 11:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.The failure mode of clever is asshole.
Modding checklists | Sequencer is in Game 5 | Space II is in Day 4-
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Realeo Jack of All Trades
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The one in my unfun mechanics list will be role swap. I have no problem with cult (alignment change), but a mafia roleswap with town is just dumb."The debate on whether short multi postings or a long wall of post is good or not is like a debate on gun control--we would never understand each other and we have to make peace with it." -Realeo
I'm mabye a serious player, but I'm capable of joke. Ok?-
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MURDERCAT he/himSurvivorhe/him
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hitogoroshi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Delayed/no flip tends to poison games.
"Don’t buy a dozen eggs if you just want a hardboiled egg. Don’t buy a head of lettuce if you just want a salad. Don’t buy eggs and lettuce if you want egg salad because those are not the right ingredients." -Julius Bloop-
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callforjudgement Microprocessor
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Anything that allows a player who doesn't have the scum wincon to know the identity of the entire scumteam is broken (this includes all groupscum → something else alignment changes). If you put enough restrictions on to prevent it breaking the game by itself, the restrictions will themselves make the game oppressive.
Post restrictions to prevent players claiming are always a bad idea (and something new mods try surprisingly often).Last edited by callforjudgement on Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.scum· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·town-
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RyanK Goon
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callforjudgement Microprocessor
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That's a commonly tried counter (and the one used in, say, Original Newbie to bring town win rates down to around 50%), but it puts scum into a 1v1 right at the start of the game, which is typically seen as undesirable. It also means that scum need to be aware of the optimal strategy for the setup right from the start of D1, which is reasonable on sites which play hundreds of marathon games in a row, but not on a site like this one where a player might only ever play a given setup once.scum· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·town-
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BBmolla Open Book
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if this topic is open for discussion anyway -
can we tweak the angle on cults/jesters?
specifically cults, I don't love the treatment cults get here. The red card thrown is "balance", but a few users have decently colorable arguments that they can balance a cult recruiter. And even "Even night cult recruiter" is arguably enough, without requiring something fundamentally different from cult be presented.
Setups with balance measures have been proposed/played on site, including large closeds like D&D, Cultist Recruiter (fundamentally different: town gets to recruit cult back), CultD3(fundamentally differentish because cult is capped at 3), and NK's micro closed (he did what was functionally even-night cult, cult lost by a landslide, and it'd be really easy to see town winning more than 40 games of 100 runs of that experience.)
Cult games are nowhere near mainstream, and that is due to their similarity to jester: a townread on a slot based on a previous dayphase gets punished if it continues to be followed. Large numbers of players don't want to mess with that, independent of each faction's probability of winning. I'm one of those people.
I'm just not very confident "don't put CL in your setup because balance" is much more palpable than "don't put ungated Sane Cop in your setup because Balance", they're almost as dramatic. Cult Leader is undeniably more dramatic - it's just, not by an entire order of magnitude, I feel.
I'd prefer the same discouragement with the "you get punished for incentives mafia generally encourages"(like jester), or discouragement due to it being rolled in under "game is based around one extremely powerful role". It is incredibly easy to argue Korina's Cult D3 falls in line with the latter characterization, it makes just about no attempt to give a cultist a fighting chance if the cult leader openwolfs day1, the game goes to 1:7 nightless.
Just a thought I guess.
I might be totally missing the plot kind of with respect to, this guide being intended to skip unnecessary steps with ToS player submitting closed ToS setups as opens and that being fundamentally different from Jingle's high competency for sketching out a new open setup"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"-
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callforjudgement Microprocessor
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There are three, mostly unrelated, problems with cults.
Problem 1: Cults, in effect, change the town win condition from "lynch all scum" to "either lynch all scum and don't get culted, or lynch all town and do get culted". The latter win condition is much harder to play towards than the former, because you don't have direct control over whether you get culted or not. (In the extreme case, imagine town mislynches in MyLo. The cult now has to cult someone to win; it doesn't matter who from the cult's point of view, the cult wins either way, but it definitely matters from the point of view of the person who gets culted! Although you can create an exception for MyLo, comparable (but smaller) issues exist even earlier in the game.)
Problem 2: An unmodified standard Cult Leader is so powerful that if they don't die early on, they nearly always win. This makes the game hugely swingy.
Problem 3: If at any point in the game, the setup has a very large town/scum ratio, then scumhunting becomes mostly meaningless and the dayplay is not very interesting, causing everyone to become demoralised.
I believe that problem 2 is fairly easy to fix using modified or variant Cult Leaders or cult mechanics. I would still go as far as saying "don't put an unmodified standard Cult Leader in your game ever", but I'd be less wary about excluding cults as a concept in general for balance reasons.
Problem 3 is a real problem that's caught out good mods in the past; it's the reason we rarely play 11:2 mountainous nowadays, for example. Cult games often have even more extreme town/scum ratios on day 1. In a game consisting of Vanilla Townies + 1 unmodified Cult Leader, optimal play is not to look at your role PM at all, or try to forget what role you have when the mod forces you to, because there is literally reason to play any differently until N1 starts and you have a scumteam. That makes D1 useless for scumhunting, when normally it's the most informative day. This problem is also fixable, but a cult that avoids it will look particularly weird and non-standard.
Problem 1 is the real killer, and the hardest to fix. It's the primary reason why cult games require a warning during signups, to exclude townies who dislike the "town vs. cult" win condition. It looks very hard to fix during setup design; you might be able to do something where townies have some level of control over whether they get culted, but it's hard to see how that would be interesting to play as cult.
I would have no problems with a cult game that had a good solution to all three of these solutions (and would consider playing in it myself if I had the time, but I probably wouldn't). If a game fixed only two out of three, I wouldn't automatically consider it a bad game, and there would probably be people who enjoyed playing it, but I wouldn't consider playing it myself.scum· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·town-
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Isis she/her, not theyBest in Classshe/her, not they
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I myself care a lot about #1, but we have large swaths of players who indicate that #1 doesn't really impact how much fun they expect to have.
#3 isn't reflected by this OP in general but is a really good point that's on my mind during design lately. Some cult nerfs can help, see Her Name is Thaumiel for a cult game with very minimized harms from 3 and as a result one of my favorite cult designs. But it's. Pretty important.
Would you object to the OP focusing it's treatment of the problem on (1)? I think for those starting out designing setups, restricting yourself to the fraction of players who tolerate the win condition instability of cult is starting on hard mode, at the least."Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"-
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callforjudgement Microprocessor
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BBmolla Open Book
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I think cults should be the sort of thing that is discouraged but people who understand that can break the ruie
I have yet to see a cult setup where the best strategy isn’t to just pray to get culted
Well that’s sort of a lie, the cult leader who literally took over the accounts it culted was balanced but that’s different@thesupertriomusical on Instagram, come see it if you’re in LA area, I wrote it!-
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Isis she/her, not theyBest in Classshe/her, not they
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I agree"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
"What? Nothing? You would make the prince suffer over... nothing?"-
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NotAJumbleOfNumbers Goon
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OP needs to be edited to remove problematic wording
PSA: USE YOUR BOOKMARKS-
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BBmolla Open Book
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