I'm not sure there are many guides out there when it comes to building a setup.
There are plenty of guides of how to moderate your game.
What I am about to describe is what I would like to introduce as a way to determine the skill level of a moderator:
Level 1 is Plot's guide for the feral crane hawks. Before we had Plot's Guide, the Open Queue was the wild west let me tell ya some of the first time mods there? I could tell horror stories about.
Level 2 is Varsoon's guide to modding, and this is the area around where most people are at.
Level 3 is where you will have mastered 1 of the 3 skills:
- Appearance: reading my posts about tables, themes, and menus. northsidegal is someone who has stood out from the crowd for how her games look. You can also do that yourself, all of the resources are there, you just have to want to put the time into it.
- Operation: You are able to run a
- Design: The Actual game itself.
Level 4 is where you have mastered 2 of the 3 skills above
Level 5 is where you have mastered all of those skills.
There are guides on basic and advance moderating principals
There are guides on how to make your game look pretty
There are guides on how to operate your game and this is something you can practice and get better at
However, not one tells you "this is how you design your game"
Instead, they all tell you about game design concepts.
This guide will tell you how to design a game.
I have told so many moderators this and some people refuse to listen.
I don't really seem to get why?
But there is a formula for how many players your game should contain.
4(scum) + 1 = total players
This is true for all types of games and is pretty standard.
If you chose to not follow this formula, you will run into issues.
First, you have to ask yourself, what kind of game do you plan on designing. And this isn't about closed or open setups, but rather how complicated do you want it to be.
I mentioned this above, but there are 3 difficulties.
This is a concept talked a bit about by Natirasha In this wiki article and the section labeled as "The Sliding Scale". The
- Simple: If you fuck up the execution of this setup then you fucked up big time. These setups are where you are most likely to see individuals without active abilities. There aren't a lot of moving parts, and the setup is so easy to run here that they practically run themselves. Most setups are around this level and that is perfectly okay, most people will enjoy simple games! If you need an example one something I would call "simple" here you go. Jingle's Vengeful Ghosts would also fit here. You can easily track all actions in a Mod PT.
- Complex: Its a bit easier to mess this up because there are just a bit more moving parts to keep track of. Role Madness games can sometimes go here if there is a lot of power. Most Large Themes will be around this level of difficulty. First one that comes to mind here is Maria's Anime Binge or the game I modded for Team Mafia 2018, Magical Stories. These games come across with something you can fuck up pretty easily. If Maria HAD bumped up the complexity of the roles, things could get messy. Had I made my TM2018 game a mechanic heavy game, with all of the complex roles I might have fucked something up, and I kept track of all of the role interactions in a spreadsheet here. You can track these types of games in a Mod PT but I would suggest using a spreadsheet.
- Nightmare: This is what happens when you did too much and you connected the simple (let's say for example in Beneath the Mask, the concept "You can perform actions in the real world and in the metaverse") with the complex (in Beneath the Mask, the complex would be is that your role does way too much, too much so that the mod can't keep track of it all). No sane man should be designing games here. Your game simply has too many parts in both mechanics and roles, and its getting to the point where it could potentially blow up on you. I have several examples of this in my modding history. Beneath The Mask had dozens of errors and is why I started testing a spreadsheet system to keep track of actions. The design of this game is so beautiful that it deserves to be in a museum, because trying to run this game would basically be impossible. I got my reputation and my title "lolbalance" from modding games like Once Upon a Time and House in the Woods where the perspective of balance was thrown out of the window. These games would be very difficult to run without a spreadsheet and would probably be fucked up by most people due to multiple moving parts. It would be pretty easy to mess something up within all of the moving parts here. I had to scrap this game and this game because they would just be impossible to humanly run. If your game is a nightmare level game, then you are putting too much on your plate.
In regards to The Sliding Scale itself, it hasn't changed and Natirasha talks all about it.
This is a hot take, but as a game designer, you do not need to be good at balancing. Its simply not your job, your job is to make the game. It is the reviewers job to make sure the game is balanced. This is a belief I strongly believe in and thats why when I describe my games as lolbalance, it means "hey, this game is probably not going to be balanced at all actually but its going to be super fun" and thats because balance isn't actually important if you say your game won't be balanced. What is important is that your game is fun. If your game isn't fun, then you wasted your time. Now, this isn't to say making your game inbalanced is ok. If you are trying to advertise a balanced game but you still left in that super op role that can't ever be killed or blocked and shoots all of the mafia in 1 night in your game, then people are going to get mad.
My point is this: Worry about balance once you are done. Focus on making your game first.
Now that you understand that your game has to be fun, you need something to design around.
Perhap its a mechanic? In Beneath the Mask, I started out with the mechanic of "ok so what this role can travel between the real world and the metaverse and have different actions in those worlds" or it could be something as simple as "In Vengeful Ghosts, if you die, you have things you can do in the dead thread." In which case, you already have something to build your game around, go build your game around it.
However if you don't have any mechanics and you are relying on mostly role interactions, how do you design your game?
Well, if you don't want to design a setup that stands out that much, you can take a setup thats already balanced and modify it a bit.
In Micc's Pokemon Sapphire game, he started with the setup of masons vs mafia and expanded on it a tiny bit.
In my Furret's Bizarre Adventure, I started with the model of "tracker + doctor = balanced" and then adjusted things from there. To make the heart of the setup different, I made the tracker an IC Tracker that couldn't die right away, and changed the Doctor to a Jailkeeper. To balance this out, I gave scum some 1-shot powers that unlocked when one of them died, also they could kill the IC Tracker once one of them died. I also wanted to play around with scum neighbors so I created a bunch of hoods and had the Jailkeeper interact with the Private Topics itself. Now, this setup wasn't perfected and there was 1 role that I added that, from a balance perspective, I probably shouldn't have added? Its not perfectly balanced, but I feel like it demonstrates the method pretty well.
However if you want a setup that is dynamic and stands out from a pure design perspective, you're better off designing your setup off of a 1-3 roles.
In a normal jjh modded, he designed his game around the PT cop. First, introduce roles that mess with the role's results, a traitor for mafia, masons and a neighborizer for town. Then have those PTs have their daytalk enabled, and thats the core of your setup. For games that follow Normal Guidelines, you only need 1 core, but however in role madness games, you might need a 2nd core or some filler roles that don't add much to the setup. Every role in your core should have some kind of purpose within the setup itself.
For lolbalance games like Once Upon a Time and House in the Woods, its important to establish that these games were Anything uPicks.
So I had to work with characters and things or whatever on the fly.
For these games, I desgined the role around the flavor, trying to realize the characters as much as I could through a mafia context.
Because in these games, these games were advertised around fun and lolbalance, I didn't have to worry about creating the actual core of the setup. I just vomitted whatever ideas came from my head into the role.
However, uPicks are challenging because not only do you have to realize the characters as much as possible through a mafia context, but also you have to create an actual dynamic setup.
What is the take away?
Your setup is important. Your setup is the actual game you have to present to people and make them play.
desiging your game around something is important because its what gives your game a personality, and its how you stand out from the crowd as a moderator.
Simply put, you make your game interesting by designing it around something.
The setups that are the best are the ones that were designed around something.