I am opinionated about modding

[Plotinus]

Why should you list replacements in your mod PT? I always have the replacements in my post 0 in the public game thread with who replaced who, and I have an up to date playerlist in the post 0 of the scum PT as well with who replaced who.

[Plotinus]

Also, I usually tell the scum that i'll release the PTs after 48 hours so they have time to object or ask for stuff to be deleted but we don't have to wait too long.

I have a rule in my ruleset that prod dodging doesn't reset the prod/replacement timer unless it contains game advancing content but i haven't figured out how much it helps yet. I added it in after a micro I modded where a bunch of town players did almost nothing but post once every 47 hours that they would catch up later.

[Plotinus]

If someone's due for a prod in the middle of the night, is it okay to wait until you wake up at whenever you were going to wake up at to prod them? I always feel bad about being late on prods but I don't want to get up at 3am either.

[Plotinus]

Why should you list replacements in your mod PT? I always have the replacements in my post 0 in the public game thread with who replaced who, and I have an up to date playerlist in the post 0 of the scum PT as well with who replaced who.

It makes it easier to know who has what role. When someone sends you a night action that just says "I target Plotinus", you need to know what they're targeting Plotinus with.

oh, that makes sense! I have a night actions post in my mod PT and when someone replaces someone with a PR then I edit their name into the right spot for the next night's actions.

i like to also put a little navigation menu in my PTs with links to all the important posts. Saves time scrolling through the thread.

[Plotinus]

I VERY strongly disagree with this.

The longer your ruleset, the more likely it is that I'm just going to ignore it entirely and not even bother reading it.

Dead serious, if your rules are longer than a screenwidth and contain basic, redundant, and even obsolete information that's frankly unnecessary to include? I'm not reading that shit. I'm just assuming you don't have anything remotely surprising in your rules.

In contrast, if I see a short, neat, ruleset that is directly to the point and contains just the essentials? Damn right I'll read it. It's short. I have no reason not to read it.

I want to make my ruleset shorter but my players keep making me feel the need to add more rules. For example the reason my rule about quoting the PT is a paragraph long is because when it was "Don't quote any private communicaiton you have access to. Paraphrasing is okay" i got so many questions and it was a hassle.

I didn't used to have "don't talk about ongoing games" in my ruleset, because I thought everybody knew that rule but then it turned out that they didn't.

In my first VC of Day 1, I always put this note: "Please take a moment to familiarise yourselves with my ruleset because I have some rules you may not have encountered in other games before regarding animated gifs, tiny text, prodging, proxying, last words, fallback kills and perhaps some other things!"

Because I figure most people are going to skim the rules and think "blahblah if I vote people I can lynch them blahblah i will get prodded if i don't post okay nothing new" and will miss that I do actually have some exciting rules in my ruleset.

[Plotinus]

I thought it helped plot, I liked it and I know it got me personally to do more than I otherwise would have when I was feeling lazy. You might start off throwing a little bit of "game advancing content" in prodge and then before you know it end up making an actual decent post instead.

I'm glad to hear it helped! It's something I always try to do with my own prodges too. I don't always succeed, but I try to make it so that the only way you can tell a post is a prodge is by comparing it with the timestamps of the post that came before it in my ISO and the one that comes after.

"don't prod me; I still think xxxx is scum" is enough to satisfy the "game advancing content" requirement, or "I'll have more time for this tomorrow but in the meantime I'd really like to hear yyyy talk more about their reads" (which is a prodge that I really liked from one of my players in that game).

Just something to keep your slot from being a complete black box, something to keep the game moving forward even if you don't have the time to make a lot of posts or a very long post.

I dunno, sometimes I find myself staring at a post and trying to decide whether it could be considered game advancing or not and thinking "ugh i hate my ruleset" but most of the time I think it helps.

[Plotinus]

Dead serious, if your rules are longer than a screenwidth and contain basic, redundant, and even obsolete information that's frankly unnecessary to include? I'm not reading that shit. I'm just assuming you don't have anything remotely surprising in your rules.

In contrast, if I see a short, neat, ruleset that is directly to the point and contains just the essentials? Damn right I'll read it. It's short. I have no reason not to read it.

I wasn't sure which approach to take when writing the ruleset for my upcoming game, so what I ended up doing was writing a comprehensive set of rules and then putting a tl;dr of the most important bits at the bottom. I think Ploti does something similar.

While we're on this subject though, a pet peeve of mine is mods including sitewide rules (e.g. don't quote your role PM, no trust tells, etc) in their ruleset.
Like, they're

sitewide

rules. We have a thread for them that is required reading.
And there's always a "follow the sitewide rules" rule immediately before them for extra redundancy.

Whhhhyyyyyyy

I put the tl;dr at the top in area tags because people are more likely to read the bit at the top. I copied this idea from Equinox.

I started adding sitewide rules into my ruleset because people don't click links.

In the beginning, I only had 11 rules, but by page 4 of my first game I already needed a new one (no tiny text).

Then I had 14 rules because I needed a new one to explain a mechanic and a new one to explain that twilight lasts until the next pagetop (longer if I'm afk).

I think I started adding the "everybody already knows this but i have to include it anyway" rules to my ruleset when i started modding newbie games. I didn't have "don't talk about ongoing" in my ruleset until two newbies PMed each other because they hadn't clicked the link in "follow all site rules" and didn't know it wasn't okay. And then in the second newbie game I modded someone used to a different site meta suggested they find someone they can trust to be town and then "whisper" their roles to that person, so I had to put a pre-emptive reminder in my page 2 votecount.


I didn't have details about how to vote in my ruleset before i started modding newbie games either.

I have 22 rules now

[Plotinus]

I do have a separate ruleset for newbies because a lot of my weirder rules are a little too weird for the newbie queue. If I ever moderate something with an experience requirement maybe i'll take out the "you can vote by typing [

v]Plotinus[/v

]" stuff.

[Plotinus]

why don't you like proxying? if someone goes away, they can lend their vote to their townread until they post in the game again. it's to prevent the game from compeltely grinding to a halt on weekends.

[Plotinus]

it is pretty fun! i've had it in 3 games so far and it's been really neat. Mostly people use it to get neighbourhoods with their townreads/townies they are buddying up to, which is fine and helps whichever faction has strong players without hurting anything, but i initially envisioned as more of a way to let town shut down those 40 page arguments that nobody wants to read by giving people a 48 hour post restriction that they can't talk about each other in public (and a room so that they can still have their conversation that nobody else cares about).


The first game I forgot to put a limit on it and found myself babysitting 22 PTs in a micro, but I learned my lesson.

[Plotinus]

it's optional. you don't have to proxy your vote to anyone if you don't want to, but you can if you do want to (and only when v/la.) It's never been used in the games i modded, but I like the idea of the option being available.

[Plotinus]

Many games offsite allow unlimited PMs between players (either as a strategy thing or because they feel it's impossible to enforce no PMs between players).
The games normally end up revolving around it; things like "as soon as a player becomes confirmed town, everyone fullclaims to that player, who can dictate lynches without having to state their evidence from then on and it's assumed that it was based on role information received from someone else". It'd make breadcrumbling pretty much obsolete.
In other words, Get a Room has a really major impact on a setup's balance unless the setup is particularly role-light.

Players are limited to one new room per player per day phase. (two new rooms in a micro). In one game I modded two town players were able to create a mini masonry and work together but in another game I modded the same thing happened between a town player and a scum player and they just continued being pretend masons until the that scum player won in 3p lylo. In the third game I modded, the post restriction part meant that a town player who had gotten a room with another town player was unable to derail their lynch because they got the room too close to the deadline.

It benefits whichever faction is more skilled at looking town and working together in private.

There are limitations on room size as well.

It can make breadcrumbing obsolete, that's true, but it can also mean you're breadcrumbing your role to the towniest member of the scumteam.

[Plotinus]

Interestingly, 2 person rooms are almost universally treated like masonries even when they aren't, but 3 person rooms are usually eaten alive by paranoia, even when all members of the room are town.

[Plotinus]

but they can only have one room, so only one or two people will be able to crumb to them in the room, and they'll probably be dying that night anyway because they're conftown.

[Plotinus]

It wasn't just your room with Postie in that game, it's also been true of for example my neighbourhood with Broseidon in Clowntardis, and Davsto experienced a similar thing in ETL's upick with a neighbourhood he was in.

Also I think there was a similar effect in the blitz I modded, not to the same extent because rooms were underutilised there, but if there are 3 people in the room people are a little better at remembering "hey this room could contain scum".

Also in slavic music mafia I when there were only 2 person rooms, a lot of notscience's rooms were treated like masonries early on and I think they would've continued to be treated that way if he hadn't got sick and been unable to keep up his activity levels while sick.

[Plotinus]

dav, they're not saying you're a bad mod. they're saying "here are some things you can do next time to be a better mod".

i've taken some advice from this thread too and started doing some things i wasn't doing before, like putting links to game events. I never really use them in games that I play, but it doesn't take so much time to include links to when replacements happened and when days ended/began.

[Plotinus]

I think some mods don't do it because they don't want to spoil the surprise of how the game ends, not realising that people who weren't playing in the game mostly just care if the person they're meta diving was town or scum.

[Plotinus]

Also try to post a votecount every day, even if there's already one on that page.

I thought about doing this in the last game I modded but there would've been 9 vote counts on a single page if I had. As it was I had 30 more posts than the top poster when the game was over.

Should I have done it anyway?

[Plotinus]

there were so many prods that I memorised how to type a prod in french even though i don't speak french.

page 27 started on July 3rd and lasted until July 13th. I posted 6 times on that page: 1 vote count, 3 prods, 1 notice that the site was back from the 28 hour downtime (this was accompanied by a mass unofficial prod), 1 bump.

If there had been conversation on that page, it wouldn't have lasted 10 days

I like one vote count per page too, especially since mine are kind of big with the picture and the get a room thing.


Some of the players seemed to only post if the game got bumped in their ego search; I don't know if more vote counts would've helped with that aspect or not. Maybe not, because they tended to need something to reply to rather than than starting their own conversations and there's not much to reply to in an unchanged vote count.