Stoofer's 3rd Law

[Yosarian2]

When designing game of Mafia, as the number and complexity of Pro-Town power roles is increased, the balance moves in favour of the Scum.

I strongly disagree. Misetings games always have lots of incredibly complicated and bastard-modded pro-town roles, and those games are almost always games with a very strong advantage to the town.

As the number and complexity of pro-town roles increase:

1. It gets harder for scum to claim safely.

2. It gets easier for the town to figure stuff out.

3. It becomes more and more likely that there's some complicated way to use the intereactions between the pro-town roles to break the game, or at least to help the town in a way the mod had not thought of when he designed the game.

4. You tend to end up with more and more confirmed or confirmable good guys, which usually dooms the scum in the endgame.

That's not to say that games complicated roles can't be balanced, but usually the more complex the game is, the harder you have to work to give the scum anything like a fighting chance.

[Yosarian2]

PS: for example, all those examples you use ("doc stops a vig from killing a scum, tracker sees a pro-town role target someone the night they die, roleblocker stops a pro-town role from doing something") usually do end up forcing a couple of claims which can hurt the town (although not so much when the town has so much power), but in the process they usually figure it out and you end up with a couple of mostly-confirmed townies; and usually there ends up being more power claimed then the scum can kill each night, which can lead to claimed trackers and roleblockers and cops revealing their result every day even without a doc keeping them safe, which gives the town even more information.

[Yosarian2]

Generally a role-blocker is neutral to negative for the town

I strongly disagree with this.

Let me put it this way. Say a roleblocker uses his ability at random night zero. Let's also say that this is a 12 person mini game with more town power then average, with a cop, a doc, a vig, a roleblocker, with 3 person mafia, and a SK.

The vig probably shouldn't do anything night zero anyway, so if you block him, no big deal.

So there's a 1/12 chance you prevent the cop from one investigation, which stops the town from getting an investigation off, but also means that the cop can confirm your claim later if needed. Small - for the town.

There's a 1/12 chance of blocking the doc, but he's only got a 2/12 chance of stopping a kill night zero, so the odds of stopping a doc from saving someone is only 2/144. Not worth worrying about.

There's a 2/12 chance that you'll stop either a scum kill or a SK kill, and either way you both prevent a kill (more likely then not a kill on a good guy), and once you figure out that there's usually two kills, you also might have a pretty good idea you might have blocked a scum night 1. Huge + for the town.

So even on night zero, with no information, a random roleblock is more likely then not the right decision for the town.

Later in the game, when you start to have an idea of who might be scum and who might be pro-town power roles, it usually gets better, although there are situations where you might not want to use the ability (say, it's a situation where if you accidently block the doc you could cost the town the game).

And in the endgame, it can be incredibly powerful, turning a lost game into a won game (say, game goes into night with 1 scum, 1 townie, and 1 roleblocker).

A roleblocker is a pretty solid pro-town role; not as strong as a cop or a doc, but probably better then a vig.

[Yosarian2]

Governor is the main role I think of as an example of a neutral-negative role in town hands. (Though I've seen a governor save someone who claimed in twilight. But that's a weird situation.)

I tend to consider any role that you can use or not use as you choose, and that does what you think it does, as at least slightly better then a vanillia townie; after all, if there never comes up a situation where the right move is to use the role, then you can never use it. And I can think of situations where it's a good idea to use the role; for example, if there's some wierd late-game situaiton where a no-lynch is the best move, the town can instead lynch and pardon in order to confirm the governor instead, as I've never seen that role as scum.

Granted you can use it stupidly and hurt the town, but if the town loses because pro-town players make bad decisions, I don't really think it's a balance issue.

Even a role like this, I would consider at least as good as a townie:

You are a day-vig townie killer. Once in the course of the game, you can choose to try and vig someone during the day; if they're a vanillia townie, they die, and if they're not, then nothing happens. You win with the town.

There are some situations where even that role would be useful (say, it's probably better to day-vig a townie and continue in day rather then lynch him, so if you're about to lynch someone might as well try and day-vig him first just in case you're wrong), and if the player uses a role like that in a dumb way, well, bad play deserves to lose.

[Yosarian2]

But in practice, it generally turned out to be bad. In one game the cop was blocked and the doc prevented the kill. So there were two pieces of bad information in the mix. I understand your comments, but I don't agree with how serious the "misses" are or how valuable the "hits" are.

-JEEP

(shrug) Two pieces of imperfect information are, theoretically, better then no information, so long as everyone involved knows the information could be wrong. The roleblocker knows that the person he blocked is more likely then random to be scum, and the doc knows the person he protected is less likely then random to be scum. One of them might be wrong, or they might be lucky and both be right just through random chance. Anyway, supplement that imperfect information with day information, and it's got to increse the town's odds of winning over having no night information, in theory.

Anyway, the scum could create the same confusion by just not making the kill and letting the doc and/or roleblocker run around like chickens with their heads cut off. But it's usually not worth doing it. So even if the roleblocker and the doc have a risk of confusing each other if one of them stops a kill and the other dosn't know it, it's still usually better to risk that confusion rather then let the scum get off their kill, so I would say that if either one stops a kill it's inherently a good thing.

[Yosarian2]

Again, when there's a lot of very compliacted roles, there's usually a way to break the game. Look at Stark's math mafia, for example; although that was abandoned, the town had already figured out how to set it up so they couldn't lose.

The more town power roles there are, the more information the town can get from claims, and interactive claims, confirming each other and making it harder for the scum to fake a claim. For example:
Mith:"I tried to track Glork, but the mod said I targeted Yosarian and nothing happned."
Glork "Ah, I'm a re-director, and I re-directed Mith's ability to Yosarian, he's telling the truth."
Yosarian "I'm untargatable at night; I breadcrubed this back in post #15. " After this, all three of our role abilities, although not our alignmnets, are mostly confirmed.

If a scum has a provable night ability, they might be able to slip by, but if not, this can make it quite easy for the town to find the scum simply through process of elimination. The downside of this is that the large number of claims will help the scum find pro-town power roles, but when the town has so many roles with night powers, the scum simply can't kill them all. Also, very quickly the town can use these interactive roles to work with each other to give them more options at night; for example, in the example above, Glork can re-direct someone he thinks is scummy over to me, thus allowing him to act as a roleblocker instead if he wants.

Very often, there comes a critical point where lots of complicated pro-town roles add up to some logical ways to "Solve" the game as a logic problem simply using night abilities, and the interactions of them.

[Yosarian2]

Yosarian's General Rule Of Thumb Which Isn't A Law: The more and the more complex pro-town power roles the mod puts into the game, the faster the theoretical power of the town grows, often in ways the mod dosn't expect.

[Yosarian2]

I can agree with that, and can think of examples, but in my experience it is more common this "theoretical" translates into Town confusion.

That might be true on mafiascum, but if so, it's only because most people here are not used to extremly compex roles and set-ups and so tend to disbelieve "flying pumpkin" type claims as a rule of thumb. On sites where complex games are the norm, and the town is psycologically prepared for them, they tend to result in very strong towns.

[Yosarian2]

More days = more information = better lynches. The math doesn't account for that. Vigging for the sake of vigging is bad.

Agreed.

Also, lynches create information, based on who was on the bandwagon, who supported the bandwagon, who opposed it, ect. Nightkills create much less information then lynches. More nightkills means less lynches, which is bad for the town.

Of course, it depends on the number of kills there already are; if there's just one town and one scum group, then two vig kills=1 less lynch, and not incidentaly 1 less night for cops and to investigate, a pretty high cost to the town, so your kill had better be a lot better then random to make it worthwhile.

On the other hand, if there's already like 10 kills a night (say, Checkmate mafia as an example) one more's not going to speed the game much.

[Yosarian2]

Well, it's always easier for the mafia to figure out what's going on, but what the mafia knows isn't as important as what the town knows. The best that can do is to improve their kill choices, whereas the more the town knows, the better their lynches get, and the better all of their night actions get; roleblocks, vigs, investigations, re-directs, or flying pumpkins. Not only that, if the town is confused having trouble who to believe, then they can often figure out a way to use their complex roles to answer questions about who is telling the truth.