Design Principles for Mafia Games Aside From Balance, Etc?

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Design Principles for Mafia Games Aside From Balance, Etc?

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 4:51 am

Post by Psyche »

I think a lot of the conversation about game setups focuses on questions of whether they are balanced (each player has a fair chance of winning) or swingy (small mistakes/successes have a decisive impact on game outcomes) or whatever, but I'm sure there are other qualities a setup can have that are just as important to whether they prove a good experience for players as anything else. As a maybe bad example, setup complexity or opacity can have meaningful consequences for player enjoyment, for instance.

I wonder if we can have a conversation that identifies and highlights these other features and maybe characterizes them in enough of a concrete way that they could conceivably be applied as useful guidance during setup design and review.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 5:49 am

Post by NorwegianboyEE »

What is the most complicated setup run on this forum? Was player enjoyment low?
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 5:55 am

Post by Infinity 324 »

I think a lot of the concepts that apply to game design in general apply here, like you want a setup to have a good amount of novelty while also being as intuitive as possible. Mech misunderstandings are annoying to sort through and can occasionally have major impacts on the game.
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 6:04 am

Post by Psyche »

So stuff like Natural Action Resolution, enforcing normalcy by default, and making flavor cohere with mechanics seem like a few ways to keep a setup intuitive, but am I missing anything? And whether novelty is good depends on what's new, right?
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 6:11 am

Post by Infinity 324 »

Simplicity is another good way to make something intuitive

Not sure what you mean by the second question
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 7:42 am

Post by Gamma Emerald »

I feel like something that might go unrecognized sometimes is the importance of player agency. A game that was won with your personal skills feels more fulfilling than a game won because the setup was broken, and a game lost because of actually bad play stings less than losing because the setup screwed you over. Of course, in the case of lost games, situations of the latter often arise because of the former (that is to say, bad play can be the cause of setup-based losses). This is probably why cop is unpopular for certain players/mods, since it gives very plain results that can turn a game around completely if used well, or even at least half-decent.

I'm sure there's more I can say but I can't think of it rn
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 8:05 am

Post by Ythan »

Make games townsided because every other faction is actually fun and that outweighs being at a disadvantage.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 8:52 am

Post by Gamma Emerald »

no it doesn't
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:03 am

Post by Kerset »

Breaking factor is also very important. Game shouldn't favor d1 massclaim or any situation, where yall decides how to use personal power roles from the very begining.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:08 am

Post by Kerset »

In post 1, NorwegianboyEE wrote:What is the most complicated setup run on this forum? Was player enjoyment low?
maybe? viewtopic.php?f=56&t=81945 or something from Tatsuya Kaname
giv me pagetop :(
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 1:44 pm

Post by Isis »

Rolecall didn't go well but Im not sure that setup concept is irredeemable
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Fri Jun 11, 2021 2:03 pm

Post by northsidegal »

Great thread!

I personally think that the two "highest level" concepts that setups should strive to get right are balance and fun. Some might argue that fun is the only one that really matters, but I think that in most cases a setup being significantly unbalanced will tend to lead towards it being unfun. (In this sense you could also say that they're actually the same thing, but whatever, it's useful for the sake of discussion I think to keep them separate)

One aspect that falls under the balance side that I think doesn't get thought of or discussed enough is "skew", a property that I think CFJ first talked about. Skew is the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky, while the other faction does not have that ability. If a game is skewed equally, then good play or lucky actions from either town or mafia should benefit their team about the same. I think that most games of mafia tend to by default be skewed in town's favor, and especially normal games. I also think that this natural town skew is what's responsible for a lot of anger over "townsidedness", again especially in normal games. Here's some of my justification on that from a thread where a lot of people thought that normal games were too townsided:
In post 54, northsidegal wrote:The very peak of scum mechanical play mostly looks like killing the best people each night, probably very good PR hunting and
maybe
good roleblocking (if scum have a roleblocker), whereas the very peak of town mechanical play (where we imagine every town PR makes the best decisions possible) would almost certainly end with town victories in most setups. I say this because Normal games tend not to be balanced around PRs making perfect checks every night, because that's not how most games go.

...
  1. Normal games aren't balanced around TPRs making perfect checks each night, because this doesn't tend to happen.
  2. If TPRs took perfect (or at least very good) actions each night, they would probably win a lot of setups.
  3. The same ability does not exist for scum, because their PRs tend to be based around disrupting town PRs. Perfect nightkills and roleblocks would stem the tide of perfect TPR actions, but would still likely give town the advantage in most games.
  4. Thus, we might say that these games are skewed, because the town can make more gains through great actions than the scum can through similarly great actions.
(Most people have probably heard a lot more about "swing" as a balance property, and might consider skew the same thing. I think that there are a lot of cases where they match up, but there are still some meaningful distinctions. For example, I would consider the Newbie A1 RB vs Cop + Doc to be a swingy setup, but not a very skewed one. Again, probably too tangential at this point)
Despite the fact that the data didn't actually bear out normal games being townsided (winrates were almost exactly 50%), the perception existed in a lot of people and seemed to be decently strong, indicating that there was at least something there. My diagnosis was and is that it was a skew problem – if you have a scumteam which is playing excellently during the day but which gets decimated by just a few night actions (as I've seen happen), it can feel both like the setup was way too townsided
and
that there was nothing else that you could have done, which is a really bad feeling.

I think it's difficult to combat skew problems because I think scum will almost always be inherently really skewed against due to their smaller numbers and more precarious position, but I think that it's worth keeping in mind ways that a setup can reward scum for good play and trying to minimize the possibility that a scumteam playing well will still get destroyed due to a few lucky actions.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Sat Jun 12, 2021 9:10 am

Post by Dannflor »

There's a mental aspect that maybe someone smarter about mafia and game design than me can put into better words

but like, a game can be theoretically perfectly balanced but still be very demotivating for one or both sides due to perceived *something* (someone smart insert a game design term here pls)

I am talking specifically about setups like forest fire (I'm remembering one particular large theme moderated by someone) that is technically balanced but due to the way play worked out, the lack of flips resulted in a sometimes oppressive game atmosphere. Is this even something that can be accounted for in game design? I dunno
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Sat Jun 12, 2021 9:36 am

Post by NorwegianboyEE »

In post 9, Kerset wrote:
In post 1, NorwegianboyEE wrote:What is the most complicated setup run on this forum? Was player enjoyment low?
maybe? viewtopic.php?f=56&t=81945 or something from Tatsuya Kaname
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Sun Jun 13, 2021 3:41 am

Post by lendunistus »

In post 6, Ythan wrote:Make games townsided because every other faction is actually fun and that outweighs being at a disadvantage.
i hate playing scum
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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:21 am

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 10, Isis wrote:Rolecall didn't go well but Im not sure that setup concept is irredeemable
I think the role allocation method needs to be simpler, in the sense of "fewer options" (as opposed to in the sense of "easier to understand") – possibly the whole setup is an argument against giving players
excessive
agency! I have been working on a sequel, but haven't had much time to work on it.




On the main topic of this thread, my current list of balance/fun properties that matter is:
- Win/loss balance (if you ran this setup repeatedly, would town or scum win more?)
- Swing (how much of the balance of this setup is determined by random chance or apparently insignificant events?)
- Skew (does one side or the other have a disproportionate ability to benefit from swing?)
- Agency (how much influence do players of a particular faction have over the end result?)
- Swing agency / "good" vs. "bad" swing (when the game does get very unbalanced very quickly, how likely is this to have been due to one faction playing well/badly, as opposed to random chance or something that nobody could predict?)

Agency in particular is something that people haven't been looking at until recently. I think there was a period of low scum agency for a while in the Normal queues, for example; games would be won or lost primarily based on how well town played, which is fun for the townies but less fun for the scum. One potential partial fix for this (that I've seen several setup designers use now) is to increase the use of Informed roles on the scum side, so that they have some idea of what they need to be playing around.

Skew is something I've been paying attention to for a couple of years now. Mafia tends to be at least mildly town-skewed by default, just because scumteams tend to be small and losing a member is often a devastating blow to a scum team, whereas individual townies are normally somewhat less critical. It can get extreme in some cases, though (excessive skew is the reason why I think 11:2 vanilla is a bad setup, even beyond its more normal balance issues). I'm not aware of any easy/general fix to this.

Of course, all these factors are related. For example, giving a faction low agency will tend to skew a game in favour of their opponents (although not always, you can e.g. imagine a setup which is skewed towards a faction with low agency because the opposing faction might easily lose important members to bad luck). And giving both factions low agency will make a game very swingy as it's mostly being decided by random events. Skew also tends to throw off players' perceptions of the balance of a setup, too, because they tend to think of the "normal scenario" when thinking about a setup's balance (which, most likely, will be the scenario that actually happened in the game), and don't take into account the possibility that all the weird scenarios might favour the same side (which means that you have to bias the normal scenario towards the other side to compensate).
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Tue Jun 15, 2021 6:38 am

Post by Menalque »

In post 6, Ythan wrote:because every other faction is actually fun
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Post Post #17 (ISO) » Wed Jun 16, 2021 2:49 am

Post by T3 »

fun
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Post Post #18 (ISO) » Wed Jun 16, 2021 1:19 pm

Post by mastina »

Fun.

A game can be balanced, and relatively low-swing.

But fun is another consideration to be had.
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Post Post #19 (ISO) » Wed Jun 16, 2021 1:42 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

In post 15, callforjudgement wrote:Agency in particular is something that people haven't been looking at until recently. I think there was a period of low scum agency for a while in the Normal queues, for example; games would be won or lost primarily based on how well town played, which is fun for the townies but less fun for the scum. One potential partial fix for this (that I've seen several setup designers use now) is to increase the use of Informed roles on the scum side, so that they have some idea of what they need to be playing around.
I wasn’t aware that was why Informed scum was becoming more common
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