Balance in Games With All Power Roles

[BBmolla]

So this isn’t necessarily exclusive to opens (assume it’s a semi open), but I was curious as a general baseline how to balance a setup filled with power roles?

How many mafia would you want in a 9 player setup? A 13 player?

[Invisibility]

thats a thing

[BBmolla]

thats a thing

not here, cause nobody wants a swingy ass game over 3 months.

but if some reason someone did, like let's say a semi-open with a giant list of power roles, how many mafia would be ideal

[Invisibility]

i thought the 7:2 10:3 splits are usually done like in most games at all?

[BBmolla]

i thought the 7:2 10:3 splits are usually done like in most games at all?

I believe that there should be more scum because if one scum is lynched day one in an all power game I think they can get screwed.

It depends on powers though too I suppose.

[Gamma Emerald]

So this isn’t necessarily exclusive to opens (assume it’s a semi open), but I was curious as a general baseline how to balance a setup filled with power roles?

How many mafia would you want in a 9 player setup? A 13 player?

You mean a role madness? Generally you’d have normal numbers but you could have more scum than normal

[callforjudgement]

I believe 9:4 is possible for a Closed role madness, but town would have to be very powerful (and scum would probably be faced with a member or two who ended up getting entirely caught by night actions, with no way to stop it; that feels fairly unsatisfactory). 6:3 might just about be doable but it feels like too much of a stretch.

10:3 (or 7:2) is entirely possible, and quite common; you design it in a comparable way to a Normal, but give most of the players power roles that have only minor effects in context or that cancel each other out (you can have town roles and scum roles that cancel). This is the approach I normally use when balancing uPicks (in which players normally don't want to be vanilla).

An

Open

setup that's entirely power roles (and not full of duplicates) has an entirely different issue: it's very hard to prevent it being broken by massclaim. Thus, role madness games tend to be no more than semi-Open (but fully Closed normally works out better because it gives you more scope to invent curveball roles that serve a particular purpose within the game without giving away most of the setup in the process).

One final possibility is to run Smalltown (i.e. every player's role is known, but roles and alignments are randomized independently of each other). That would use the normal numbers (i.e. 10:3 or 7:2), and is balanced by varying how many of the roles are beneficial to town or beneficial to scum, e.g. town can make good use of a Roleblocker but scum can do better with it, town find a Cop very useful but scum's only use for it is to keep it out of town's hands, Miller is negative utility for town but massive positive utility for scum (because in a Smalltown it's equivalent to Godfather).