Colour in role PMs

[callforjudgement]

(This problem originally came out of some role PM standardisation work I was doing for Normals. However, this is very much a Theme problem, so it's not really within the NRG's purview.)

Many (most?) moderators use colour in their role PMs and flips in order to make it clearer at a glance what faction a player belongs to. However, I'm interested in what the most common colour scheme for this is, and if particular factions tend to always be associated with particular colours. (Also, if anyone uses colour for features other than faction/win condition, I'd be interested in that too!)

Town and Mafia are by far the most used factions, and tend to be consistently associated with green and red. Werewolves (and second Mafia) also seem to have a standardised color, being given a different shade of red from the Mafia (although the difference between "red" and "darkred" isn't visible on mafBlack, so perhaps they should be orange or something nowadays).

The only other colour that I'm fairly confident in is that Survivors are grey. This normally results from a wincon change following a modkill – people tend to get mad at mods for putting a Survivor in their setup – but that's common enough for me to have observed a pattern in how mods did it.

But what about all the other possible factions/wincons? Do they have colours of their own? If not, what colour should be used for, e.g., the setup summaries on the wiki? I feel like Serial Killer is definitely used often enough to be standardised/standardisable, and Jester might be.

A full list of the factions that need colours: Town, Mafia, Serial Killer, Werewolf, Survivor, Unjester, Jester, Mime, Lyncher, Unlyncher, Cult, Inquisitor, Mentor, Arsonist. My current provisional assignment is shown on the wiki as Template:FactionColor, but you might well have better ideas on how to colour things than I do. Ideally, the colours would be at least visible on every skin, and would not mislead players about how their win condition worked.

[Ircher]

I think Serial Killers are generally colored purple or gray.
---
Town = Green
Mafia = Red
2nd Mafia/Werewolves = Orange
Serial Killers = Purple
Neutral Survivors = Gray

[zMuffinMan]

Cults have always been black IME (though I haven't seen them often and my most vivid memory of them is in Brightest Day where they were literally "Black Lantern Corps" so that may be a part of why I associate them with black).

I don't think most of the other factions have a standard colour (nor do I really think they need one) and I think it's generally up to individual mods (though the same could be said for the regular factions as well).

Jesters should have rainbow text though. Always. No exceptions.

[callforjudgement]

It's probably impossible to get the wiki to produce rainbow text (unless we can do it with some sort of CSS filter).

I agree that most of the obscure factions probably don't have a standard color, but I'm working on an automated role PM generator and it'll have to use something.

Perhaps some simple rule like "town-compatible third parties are grey, town-incompatible third parties are purple"? Or do we want to make each third party a different color in case two of them are used in the same setup?

[zMuffinMan]

Re: that last line, put them into slots maybe. Highest priority slot (e.g. Serial Killer) gets standard purple, go down a list until you get to the last one (even if it's ultimately just different distinct shades of purple)?

EDIT: In case this wasn't clear, if you're not worried about revealing the fact that there's a certain amount of third parties in the game, if there are multiples, just give the serial killer dark purple, the jester light purple, some other anti-town third party a shade of pink, etc. But if it's a jester with no serial killer, give it dark purple because it's the highest priority.

Or just standardise it like that and have purple(ish) colours represent anti-town singular third parties and give them the same distinct shades every game.

[mastina]

I generally use:
Green as Town
Blue as second Mafia, Town, or Special Town (in rare circumstances)
Red as Mafia
Crimson as second Mafia or Werewolves
Brown as an alternative color for Werewolves
Orange for benevolent 3p
Yellow for neutral 3p (e.g. Jester, Lyncher)
Gold for town ally that's not part of town
Black for some form of anti-town faction be it second mafia or malevolent 3p
Purple for cults and serial killers but not both in the same game at the same time
Gray for survivors
Silver for survivoresque but not survivor
White as an alternative to silver
And Cyan as an alternative to Blue.

This may be an incomplete list though. I compiled an ALMOST (I missed a few here and there) complete list of all the named-colors which are coded to work on the site a while ago. (If I recall correctly, something like 40ish total.)

[callforjudgement]

There's a lot more than 40. Anything on this list should work if you remove the spaces, e.g. palevioletred.

[Alisae]

I generally use:
Green as Town
Blue as second Mafia, Town, or Special Town (in rare circumstances)
Red as Mafia
Crimson as second Mafia or Werewolves
Brown as an alternative color for Werewolves
Orange for benevolent 3p
Yellow for neutral 3p (e.g. Jester, Lyncher)
Gold for town ally that's not part of town
Black for some form of anti-town faction be it second mafia or malevolent 3p
Purple for cults and serial killers but not both in the same game at the same time
Gray for survivors
Silver for survivoresque but not survivor
White as an alternative to silver
And Cyan as an alternative to Blue.

This may be an incomplete list though. I compiled an ALMOST (I missed a few here and there) complete list of all the named-colors which are coded to work on the site a while ago. (If I recall correctly, something like 40ish total.)

[yessiree]

why not just steal the coloring scheme from ToS

[Plotinus]

I usually use bright green for VT, regular green for town PR, red for mafia goon, a darker red for mafia PR

but given the prevalence of red/green colour blindness, in a game with 13 players there's roughly a fifty-fifty chance that at least one player will be colour blind (higher, actually, since there are more men than women on this site). So it might be better to adopt a scheme like blue town, deepskyblue town PR vs red mafia, coral mafia pr

or lime VT green town PR orange mafia goon orangered mafia pr.

Or we could do like traffic lights do and have teal town and orange red mafia

I'm not colourblind though so I don't know for sure how well these solutions would work.

[brassherald]

lime and bright green are very hard to read on mafsepia. by the way. I try not to use those at all.

[mastina]

To date, the only time I've needed that many was in Gistou, which (deliberately) subverted some of those anyway (red and yellow were both town for instance); you're not going to need more than three or four colors at most in basically any game.

[Aronis]

I've used red, blue and pink for mafia before.
I've used green, blue, purple, and black for town.

[Aristophanes]

However, this is very much a Theme problem, so it's not really within the NRG's purview.

I mean, this goes into NRG amd Wiki groups and should really be more standardized. I often use a darker red for mafia and a not in your face green for town because I like respecting the eyes of my players

Third Party Blue and Third Party Orange are usially what I use for extra factions, while Jester Yellow would be its own special thing if I used them. Depending on the game I'd use it for a lyncher too probably.

Ive typically considered SK and Cult for the blue/orange, with a preference for Cult Blue and SK Orange. Survivor makes sense in the light grey but I'd prefer to use a colour with a quick tag.

If colours do get set for factions I think it would be really handy to have them in their own colour bar, or even better, make a [color=scum][ /color] tag (or both) so mods can easily remain consistent

[callforjudgement]

Well, most of these alignments don't exist in Normal games, although "which colours should we use in Normal role PMs for scum and town" is something that the NRG might want to regulate, I guess? I thought it was standardised already, though, but maybe not.

Also, the grey I used for Survivor above is just "gray".

[Ircher]

Why not just:
Town = Green
Mafia = Red
Werewolves = Brown
2nd Mafia/Aliens = Orange
Cult = Blue
Self-Aligned 3rd Parties (i.e.: win by themselves) = Purple
Neutral-Aligned 3rd Parties (i.e.: can win with other primary factions) = Gray

[FakeGod]

I use town and scum.

[Zachrulez]

I actually use blue for power roles which worked fine for a really long time until someone in one of my games thought to try to use that against the scum. Now I see value in being more open about the color scheme you use as a mod.

I use green for vts, red for scum, orange for 2nd scum, and I don't think I've ever needed to go further than that. I think if I had an SK I'd use black for that.

[mutantdevle]

I use this green for town. It's much nicer than the more common this green imo.

I'm yet to use any colour other than red for any other faction though.


Interestingly, my mod colour is blue but whenever I mention a player's name I revert back to black then give their alignment in either red or green.

[Not Known 15]

I use this color for town, this color for Mafia...
but then it doesn't matter much because I always flip them with Mafia /Town/ whatever before the role name, except for Vanilla Townie.

[Sakura Hana]

Town
Mafia
Werewolf
Serial Killer or Survivor
Jester or Alien
Cult
Sometimes I need several for those Great/Greater/Greatest Idea Mafia games.