Mod Effort?

[yellowbounder]

Flavour is rendered of no use to the town if you're dealing with an Open Game.

Maybe that's why I like Open Games.

[Yosarian2]

I like flavor in games, certanly, especally in theme games. Even a basic mafia game should have some flavor, but in theme games it's absolutly key.

[Mr. Flay]

It means "pancake house", or more precisely, All-Night Pancake House, as in, serves pancakes at night.

I still have no idea what you're talking about.

[Shanba]

he means he added a panckae house as a flavour element.

[Thestatusquo]

This thread has touched on something that I think IS important to note. The ammount of flavour/mod effort, should NEVER change the functionality of the role. Your role should do the exact same thing if you have a line of text, or three paragraphs. This is where I had a serious problem with old maid mafia, because I felt that in the interests of being flavorful, the mod was very much overly complex in how his roles turned out, and that ended up hurting my enjoyment of the game.

[yellowbounder]

It means "pancake house", or more precisely, All-Night Pancake House, as in, serves pancakes at night.

I still have no idea what you're talking about.

I suggest you read a couple of my posts in Freelancer. If you

really

want to know.

[Mr. Flay]

No, I got it now, I was looking MUCH too hard for an analogy, when you were

actually

saying the game turned into a pancake house. :trout:

The amount of flavour/mod effort, should NEVER change the functionality of the role.

This is an excellent point to remember.

[Zindaras]

Ok, well this game is a theme game, so it'll have flavor, and the roles will fit the characters. I'm just not sure if it's worth writing a paragraph to go with the role.

It's the difference between:

a) You are Glork. Due to your awesomeness, you are a cop.

and

b) OMGZORZ! You are teh Glrok! No one doubts your awesomeness, although your scumhunting statistics are debated among many. As such, you are given a chance to prove yourself to the scum community. Each night, you may choose someone and find out if they are, in fact, scum. However, you must have voted them at least once during the previous day, to show that you actually suspected them. You win with all threats to your complete and utter awesomeness have been eliminated.

I'd take b over a any day,

especially

if we're talking about an unknown or a not very well-known subject. I like reading a little background story, I like detailed roles.

One thing to be careful about; the more complicated the role PM's are, the more likely town will attempt to use that to it's advantage. At some point that starts being part of a balance issue.

Only possible if there's a distinctive thing tying all town PMs together. If all the PMs are worded in the same way, no metagaming's going to help, because Mafia can fake a PM just as easily as a townie.

[Yosarian2]

This thread has touched on something that I think IS important to note. The ammount of flavour/mod effort, should NEVER change the functionality of the role.

Well...I don't know about the flavor never changing the functionality of the role. I mean, a lot of great theme games involve some unique roles where the role abilities directly follow from the flavor of the role. When you can make a role that has great flavor directly tied into a great role, it's awesome. For example, in viewtopic.php?t=2436&start=0, Astuto-Umore, everyone was in either the town of Astuto or the town of Umore, except for Lordo, the bridge troll that was a SK-like role, that could see whenever anyone in one town crossed the bridge to target anyone in the other town, and could kill and eat any one of those bridge crossing people. When a role combines flavor and functionality like that, it really captures the imagination and adds to the fun of the game.

The role funtionality is the most important thing, though. Every role should be a fun role to play that intereacts in logical and predictable ways with other roles, no matter how complex or theme based the game is.

[Thok]

One thing to be careful about; the more complicated the role PM's are, the more likely town will attempt to use that to it's advantage. At some point that starts being part of a balance issue.

Only possible if there's a distinctive thing tying all town PMs together. If all the PMs are worded in the same way, no metagaming's going to help, because Mafia can fake a PM just as easily as a townie.

I claim that in a game where PM's look like the second version of the Glork PM's, it's much harder to make up a good fake claim. Basically, the point is that now I need to be able to imitate the writing style of the player in question, and figure out what would be a reasonable story from him.

Let me put it this way; if a mod gave you a one shot ability to force him to write a fake role PM for you to use, you'd definately use it in the second game, and wonder what the hell the mod was thinking in the first game.

[Albert B. Rampage]

Effort for death scenes is good. Effort for role flavor is bad. Its best to leave the player's individual role to their imagination, rather than paint their role to be what you think is most accurate.

In a theme game?

Regular games.

[xyzzy]

Like YB said, random flavor (as opposed to flavour) is fun. One of the ideas I have has an extensive back story, but it's a pointless and silly story that I pretty much pulled out of my butt. That's not a lot of effort, but it's a nice touch.

Thank you for derailing my topic.

...You're welcome?

I was serious. You don't have to break the game with flavor as long as there's a big line between the flavor and the actual roles.

If you have Glork as a cop, you're following logical patterns and anyone can guess it.

If you have Glork as a pirate captain who may only post in "ARR!"'s, then no one will be able to say, "Hey, that doesn't fit in with the theme!" if there role is just as random.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

why put effort into writing PMs when you can get your trained group of monkeys to do it for you?

[Albert B. Rampage]

why put effort into writing PMs when you can get your trained group of monkeys to do it for you?

So says the mod who is too lazy to send out role pms to his vanilla townies

[EmpTyger]

Back in the days of Cadmium and such, people were always like "Wow, what great night scenes, and awesome role pms!" Now, the only place it gets mentioned is the scummies.

So I guess the question is: Is it really worth it? Do any of you players care?

Speaking from my own experiences, quite the opposite: I've never even gotten a Scummy nomination for flavorscenes, but I have received numerous compliments for both LOST Mafia and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Scum. (I suppose in fairness the scenes in R&GAS weren't strictly flavor, as they were tied to a game mechanic. Still, arguably any flavor in a themed game isn't merely flavor...)

I generally keep it simple if non-themed and go all-out if themed. (of which the former I suppose has become site policy?) When I do use flavor, I generally put extreme effort into flavor because it's personally satisfying; *I* have a lot of fun doing it. The fact that players (and non-playing lurkers) also seem to enjoy it is just a very nice side benefit. Ie If you're going to do flavor, may as well do it well.

I claim that in a game where PM's look like the second version of the Glork PM's, it's much harder to make up a good fake claim. Basically, the point is that now I need to be able to imitate the writing style of the player in question, and figure out what would be a reasonable story from him.

Let me put it this way; if a mod gave you a one shot ability to force him to write a fake role PM for you to use, you'd definately use it in the second game, and wonder what the hell the mod was thinking in the first game.

This is exactly why flavor is bad in non-open normal games. Flavor is not balance-neutral; the mod must take into consideration claiming strategies and confirmability when designing setups. For the purposes of MoS's original question, whatever appropriate measures required for balance could be taken depending on what aesthetic quality is wanted.

[NabakovNabakov]

I don't see what all the fuss about having to mimic writing styles while claiming is about. Posting role PM's isn't allowed anyway. Whether somebody got the Glork PM a or b it would still pretty much amout to "Yeah guys, I'm Glork the Cop" if the player had to claim.

I can totally see how flavor can hurt balance, but it doesn't have to. You can write a novel about the role, but if you don't actually change the mechanics, you should be fine with theoretical balance, and safe claims or mod-created themes can prevent flavor from messing around with the in-game balance.

Btw, I totally claim "So flavorless the actual flavor of the game is flavorlessness" for my Mini-Normal (so don't you guys steal it). Everybody will get an incredibly detailed PM about how little flavor their role has. I just hope it'll fit into a thread title.

[Yosarian2]

I don't see what all the fuss about having to mimic writing styles while claiming is about. Posting role PM's isn't allowed anyway.

Yeah, but paraphrasing flavor is generally allowed. You've got to make sure that the scum have enough info to invent convincly paraphrased flavor; either detailed fake claims, or a detailed claim in the mod rule post, or both. Sometimes it's not entierly necessary, like it's not that hard to invent detailed flavor if you know you're playing, say, Star Wars mafia and know Luke Skywalker is a safe claim, but you don't want a scum to get lynched because he didn't know the mod sent all of the townies long, funny, heavily flavored role PM's.

[Mr. Flay]

I always try to make my scum PMs as parallel as possible to the town PMs in quality/length, but i also hand-write at least a majority of the town PMS to be individually different, to avoid word counting, etc. Posting the Townie PM (whether or not any townies actually exist) is something everyone should consider, as well.

Yos, I think EmpTyger was saying that you shouldn't

add

any functionality by way of flavor; the two example PMs posted earlier in the thread were a bad example, because one was actually functionally different than the other. A better example would be:

You are a

Miller

of the town, but you also function as a

Bomb

if attacked at night. You win with the town.

You are Jorg McBehann, a

Miller

on the edge of the town of Galumph. You are distrusted because your family has only lived in this small town for three generations, not twelve like most folks. Because of this, you will come up guilty if investigated for the crimes going on in town. However, because you live on the edge of town, where wild creatures and brigands prowl the night, you also have the ability to defend yourself. If you are attacked at night, you will kill your attacker as well before succumbing to their assault. You win when all threats to the town have been eliminated, even if you die yourself in the effort.

[Mastermind of Sin]

All scum role pms would have as much effort and quality put into them as the town pms.

[NabakovNabakov]

Word counting townie PM's?

Damn

[/u] if that ain't tricky. That goes above and beyond standard exploitation of flavor-based loopholes.

[NabakovNabakov]

Word counting townie PM's?

Damn

[/u] if that ain't tricky. That goes above and beyond standard exploitation of flavor-based loopholes.

[Mert]

Where there is more than one of a certain role (townie being most likely), you could just write a different PM or flavour for each townie, negating the usefulness of any flavour claims or wordcount claims, etc.

You could also scatter different role names through your vanilla set so that one may be a townie, another a townsperson, another a villager, etc. I believe some mods already do this in some games.

[Yosarian2]

Word counting townie PM's?

Damn

[/u] if that ain't tricky. That goes above and beyond standard exploitation of flavor-based loopholes.

If anyone said how many words were in their townie PM, I'd modkill them on the spot.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

If anyone counted the number of words in the role pms I sent out and counted wrong, I'd have a giant clown laugh at them and steal their pants.

[Glork]

Word counting townie PM's?

Damn

[/u] if that ain't tricky. That goes above and beyond standard exploitation of flavor-based loopholes.

If anyone said how many words were in their townie PM, I'd modkill them on the spot.

Eh... if I have a standardized Townie PM, I'd probably just post it before the game started. Of course, I've been known to make nonstandard townie PMs, which makes that method of loopholing kinda pointless.


But yeah, deliberate attempts to exploit the game like that can be worthy of a modkill.