Mafia Cards: Help finalize card list and sample setups

[callforjudgement]

The most obvious missing setup to me is White Flag. 10:3 should be fairly balanced face-to-face (which is more townsided than forum Mafia), and it might be worth making it a variable setup.

With respect to the second design contest, my setup Grey Flag Nightless (6:3 vanilla, Vengescum, White Flag) was a finalist and has had a couple of successful tests. Unfortunately, it's fairly sensitive to changes in player numbers, unlike simpler vanilla formats. An older version of the same setup, Black Flag Nightless (7:3 vanilla, White Flag, Nightless, 3:2 is an immediate scum win) is 10 players and also works fairly well (it has some known problems related to replacements, but that shouldn't be a problem in face-to-face games). The only other setup of mine I'd suggest as potentially useful is Vote For Town, which is basically mountainous vanilla with the win conditions swapped (town win via lynching enough townies that the scum have half the votes, scum win via having the whole faction lynched, self-voting is only allowed if it's the hammer); note that it needs more townies relative to scum to be balanced than a typical Nightless does (we've been running 6:2 on the forums but something around 7:2 or 9:3 is probably correct for face to face).

It might be worth mentioning in the rulebook that Bulletproof only works once. Unlimited Bulletproof is fairly rare, and making Bulletproof single use would solve your Serial Killer problem.

In terms of cards to print, I'd suggest printing a 1-shot Town Cop card. That's very valuable in Closed setups, and it might even be worth printing a 2-shot version. (Other powerful town investigatives – Neopolitan (not in the deck IIRC), Watcher, Gunsmith – are also frequently seen 1-shot in Closed setups.) Strongman (which is in the deck IIRC) is nearly always 1-shot, and I'm not sure there's even much value in printing an unlimited version. Odd/even night modifiers are most useful on roles that block other roles, notably Town Doctor and Mafia Roleblocker. I mostly see Bulletproof on otherwise vanilla townies nowadays (often just 1-shot, although it doesn't matter much in this situation). Weak is best on Town Doctors and to a lesser extent Town Cops (although Weak Doctor can safely substitute for Weak Cops in most setups). Approximately how many slots are you looking to fill with modified roles?

[callforjudgement]

I meant, specify in the rulebook that the Bulletproof modifier is 1-shot.
I was trying to list the most common uses for each modifier, in part to see if we wanted them at all. If the best use for a modifier isn't very good, we may as well just skip it.

I guess here would be a short list I'd suggest of role+modifier combinations, most important at the top:
1-shot Town Cop
Bulletproof (or 1-shot Bulletproof) Townie [the difference between these is small enough that they can normally be swapped out within a setup without unbalancing it]
1-shot Mafia Strongman (most likely replacing the unlimited version; an unlimited Strongman is hard to use in a setup)
Macho Town Cop
Weak Town Doctor
1-shot Town Vigilante
(1-shot Bulletproof) Serial Killer

That's only 6 extra cards if you replace the Strongman, so it's possible that there's space for some less important role+modifier combinations. Some suggestions:
1-shot Town Day Vigilante [often very fun in more casual games]
Even Night Mafia Roleblocker [most frequently used odd/even role in my experience]
1-shot Town Watcher / 1-shot Town Gunsmith (not sure which of these would work better, probably not worth adding them both)
Bulletproof (or 1-shot bulletproof) Vigilante [admittedly, this is mostly a joke suggestion, but it's a surprisingly commonly used joke role; pity it can't be a Miller too]

(Also, you might want to consider putting the Day icon on the Treestump, given that it can be activated during the day.)

[callforjudgement]

Does anyone have a good name for a modifier which means "if this role is lynched, your alignment loses"? Best I have come up with so far is "lynchpin", though "Lynchpin Godfather" sounds pretty strange.

I use "secretary" for this, and make it act like a role name from a grammatical point of view (i.e. "Mafia Secretary" or "Godfather Secretary"). The idea is that once you lynch them, you get to see the list of members and track down all the rest.

If you want something that's more like a modifier grammatically, "Critical" might work.

[callforjudgement]

Dayvig should be 1-shot. Otherwise it basically just becomes a must-kill role for the scum. (Especially in face-to-face games, it's really obvious who the dayvig is and that they're town, so you don't want to give them additional power to shoot people on later days on top of that.)

With that clarification, I like this list. (I agree that a Dependent Goon is easier to work into a custom setup than a Vengeful-style Godfather.)

[callforjudgement]

You could use it as one in a custom setup easily enough.

(Admittedly, I don't really understand the fascination with the Desperado role.)

[callforjudgement]

I suspect it'd need too many cards, in addition to making modless play nearly impossible.

[callforjudgement]

I'm a little surprised to see C9 on there. It's known to be highly scumsided (around 70% in terms of what happened in newbie games in practice). I guess it might nonetheless be appropriate for face-to-face because town finds things easier there. (Thinking about it, Original Newbie is probably more balanced if you want that sort of 7P; it's broken but has a more balanced winrate than C9 if both sides play optimally around the brokenness via pre-emptive fakeclaims and the like (and it's also more balanced than C9 if neither side knows the breaking strategies). That sort of setup is rare on mafiascum.net but more commonly played on other sites.)

Vengeful and C9 have awkwardly positioned line breaks, and would take up the same amount of space if you placed a linebreak between scum and town (like you do in most other setups). You probably also want to be consistent in whether there's a comma between scum and town in cases where there's a line break.

In Kids with Guns, it's unclear to me what

CI

is supposed to mean. You might want to spell it out.

Matrix6, F11, and Every Step You Take are missing commas at the end of their first lines (because the line break doesn't separate alignments in those setups).

Operating Room is missing a rule that's essential to the setup (that if more than one doctor targets a player, that player dies). Without the rule it is very scumsided; it's better to remove the setup altogether if it doesn't fit once the rule is explained, than it is to use the current version of it.

[callforjudgement]

I think that rulebook insert would work, and the two-Innocent-Children method would also work. I don't like the idea of using a CI lover as an Innocent Child stand-in.

(I also checked to see if we could just change the Innocent Children to Masons in the setup and still have a workable setup, but given that Less Pressure has probably been townsided in practice (4 town wins in 5 games is a small sample size but may be large enough), and that face-to-face play is also a townsided mechanic, making it more townsided by not force-revealing the Masons is probably a bad idea. If I were in a face-to-face group, I might try testing that setup with a VT over one of the Innocent Children as a method of making it a little less townsided, but I'm not sure I could recommend an untested change like that at a stage this late.)

[callforjudgement]

Given that the list is now effectively final, is it worth unstickying this thread?

EDIT: Ah right, the setups themselves might not be final even if the role cards are.