A Mid-Scummer Night's Dream - D.S. al Fine

[fferyllt]

The one thing im mad about is still my role tbh.
It feels like the one thing i believed in that should never be done when making a game, concentrating all or most of the town power on a single role, happened anyway.
The lack of knowledge about dreams and what they could potentially do put a lot of pressure on me, thinking that a single correct or wrong action could heavily swing the game made me play more into scum's hands or subotpimally by targeting the obvious NKs.

Your role was a very late addition to the design. The other three dream-related PRs were in the design from the start. Originally the dreams targeting individual players were going to be randomly assigned. We spitballed several possibilities before settling on the Daydreamer. And we wondered if whoever got the role would do better than a random roll at hitting town.

I think you did better than a random roll in choosing town dreamers to receive the dreams.

I feel bad that the role was so stressful to you, and I wonder if one of the other possible dream-related PRs we thought about during the final days would have been better/less stressful for whoever got it.

[mastina]

I think this setup was scum sided by a lot but I think scum deserved to win much more then the scum this game.

Echo.

[Brian Skies]

to say nothing of the tone of it which is a whole other issue

And your post, which is clearly taking shots at the mods, has perfectly acceptable tone?

I agree that the lack of reward in relation to the challenge was a problem. The dreams were vague and difficult to decipher, but the mods also thought the dreams would be obvious to figure out, and that probably played into their setup's design.

[mhsmith0]

I think this setup was scum sided by a lot but I think scum deserved to win much more then the scum this game.

Echo.

I'd take away the "much more" part (TWIE did essentially nothing in his entire ISO; and LLD was incorrectly cleared by claim and lack of reasonable town power even if she exexuted it reasonably well)... but I'd say in a more balanced world, reg wins solo or takes a buddy with him to endgame. Scum played better, but by no means were they so much better that they should have stomped.

Scum were better but not massively better; the lack of town power that basically always exists to give town SOME kind of help magnified town's flaws and minimized scum's. Normally you see stuff that gets a clear out of a scummy town (whoever it is), condemns a scum that's somewhat deep wolfing; etc. Scum were also much more able to kill whoever was convenient to kill by game state instead of being forced to hunt the cop/vig/jk/etc, which further enabled the proscum environment.

The simple fact that they kept killing whoever suspected LLD, for instance, while a red flag in this game that went underexplored, is also kind of blatantly not how scum in most games are ever allowed to act. Normally they kind of HAVE TO go hunting for PR tells; a game where they don't have to do this eliminates useful town voices earlier and heightens the consequences of any town dysfunction.

[Sakura Hana]

Normally they kind of HAVE TO go hunting for PR tells; a game where they don't have to do this eliminates useful town voices earlier and heightens the consequences of any town dysfunction.

Just like mountainous pretty much

[Brian Skies]

sorry, that's not on the players, and that's not "I guess you just want your hand held".

I'm going to be quite frank with you. I told you guys LLD's play was probably scum and that her flavor didn't make any sense, and instead of listening to me and realizing that she hadn't crumbed her day 1 role (which is a huge red flag for any hider role), you all continuously ignored the scumminess of her claim and let her evade a lynch for

days

. Including past 'the day before lylo' which is the endpoint for most scummy claims and other roles that have outlived their welcome.

I think the biggest issue was that you were all 'hoping' there'd be some role to save you all or hold your hand, and you blaming this on the mod just sounds like an excuse for town failing to make the right play.

[Brian Skies]

If there is one reason I can point to as to why town are going to lose this game, I would say it's because most of the town have been in this mindset that they have to play not to lose for several rounds now. And I don't think that's how Mafia should be played at all.

^I stand by this. And after losing Shaman Mafia because the town wouldn't listen to me on TTH (who had a scummy investigative claim) and Gay Mafia III (where I literally had to steal a gun from one scum to shoot a different scum that was clearly a scum doctor), I think town losing this game to LLD's claim will be better for this site's meta. Even if it only serves as a wake-up call to the players that played in this game.

[mhsmith0]

I think the biggest issue was that you were all 'hoping' there'd be some role to save you all or hold your hand, and you blaming this on the mod just sounds like an excuse for town failing to make the right play.

It's mainly an expectation of balance given site norms (and large themes are consistently high scum win rates, WAY over 50%), of which this game was flagrantly out of line with, even for the baseline of "standard" large themes.

When essentially everyone is wondering what in the world is possibly going on wiht the design and town power is just monumentally out of line with what town power almost always is (and, again, town win rates in large themes are AWFUL as far as I can tell, even ignoring multiball issues), that's on design much more than town.

When scum get a free extra kill at night and win a day phase sooner because the mods made the masons lovers for no reason that I can fathom, that's on design.

When scum get a free global roleblock (which kind of BLATANTLY suggests that town power is something other than essentially zero), that's on design.

etc etc etc

Yes, town made mistakes. Yes, scum was the better team. But town never got anything at all that was materially useful all game long. In a LARGE THEME GAME. And just looking at the design, it was incredibly difficult for town to EVER get much of anything useful in this setup. That's a fundamental design bust. It just is. And you being correct about LLD doens't change any of that.

[beeboy]

I think this setup was scum sided by a lot but I think scum deserved to win much more then the scum this game.

Echo.

I'd take away the "much more" part (TWIE did essentially nothing in his entire ISO; and LLD was incorrectly cleared by claim and lack of reasonable town power even if she exexuted it reasonably well)... but I'd say in a more balanced world, reg wins solo or takes a buddy with him to endgame. Scum played better, but by no means were they so much better that they should have stomped.

Scum were better but not massively better; the lack of town power that basically always exists to give town SOME kind of help magnified town's flaws and minimized scum's. Normally you see stuff that gets a clear out of a scummy town (whoever it is), condemns a scum that's somewhat deep wolfing; etc. Scum were also much more able to kill whoever was convenient to kill by game state instead of being forced to hunt the cop/vig/jk/etc, which further enabled the proscum environment.

The simple fact that they kept killing whoever suspected LLD, for instance, while a red flag in this game that went underexplored, is also kind of blatantly not how scum in most games are ever allowed to act. Normally they kind of HAVE TO go hunting for PR tells; a game where they don't have to do this eliminates useful town voices earlier and heightens the consequences of any town dysfunction.

Maybe "much more" was a stretch as there was a lot of solid town play going.

But I found scum was doing a really good job of tailoring there posts to the town and I feel like that is being under appreciated in the post game because the setup wasn't balanced.

[mhsmith0]

If there is one reason I can point to as to why town are going to lose this game, I would say it's because most of the town have been in this mindset that they have to play not to lose for several rounds now. And I don't think that's how Mafia should be played at all.

^I stand by this. And after losing Shaman Mafia because the town wouldn't listen to me on TTH (who had a scummy investigative claim) and Gay Mafia III (where I literally had to steal a gun from one scum to shoot a different scum that was clearly a scum doctor), I think town losing this game to LLD's claim will be better for this site's meta. Even if it only serves as a wake-up call to the players that played in this game.

Now THAT I think is a reasonable point. I agree with the passive "play not to lose" attitude being harmful.

But I don't think anyone's going to really learn anything from this in terms of playstyle when the setup remains the biggest driving factor of the outcome, and scum successes and town mistakes the secondary parts.

There were four scum, and town lost with just four mislynches, and never got anything useful at night, and there wasn't a really shitty vig to blame. Sorry, but that's design far more than play.

[mhsmith0]

I've also (as an example) explicitly had conversations with other people who do setup design about the concept of "well if someone claims a useful PR I don't care, just lynch them if htey're scummy" and I feel that in current site meta you're just super likely to end up lynching useful PRs, and that part of why setups tend to be "townsided" is that towns WILL end up YOLO lynching their cop on day 1 because of whatever.

[fferyllt]

to say nothing of the tone of it which is a whole other issue

And your post, which is clearly taking shots at the mods, has perfectly acceptable tone?

I agree that the lack of reward in relation to the challenge was a problem. The dreams were vague and difficult to decipher, but the mods also thought the dreams would be obvious to figure out, and that probably played into their setup's design.

On day 1, watching people figure out what that day's dreams probably were, we thought (and Vi agreed) that we'd made the dreams way too guessable, and if we'd had it to do over after Day 1, the dream text would have become less obvious than what we put together for this game.

I think The day one selection was a combination of fairly easy to guess dreams. The day 2 dream guesses were also pretty spot-on, and I'm not surprised Day 2 was the day the scum team decided to use the dreamspike global block.

By Day 5, even though the Hider dream actually had the word "hide" in the text, and the image was someone hiding in a box, town had lost interest in guessing the dreams. That day, more scum players voted than town did, and they voted as a block so they got the dream they preferred.

Why this happened? I'm not sure. It probably had something to do with the Monty-Hall style partial reveals. "Do you want the dream you know something about, or do you want what's behind Door #2?"

All in all, I'm a little regretful about the Monty Hall approach. Maybe we should have provided the pictures to go with the text for all three dreams each day.

Another thing we discussed a lot with the reviewers was whether discussion of the dreams would get in the way of scumhunting, or if players would get tired of talking about the dreams and start ignoring them. At one point the moonrise phase was going to happen with an open thread so players could put off talking about the dreams until after the lynch was accomplished. The Monty Hall idea won out.

But I think we were onto something when we worried that choosing dreams would become less of a priority as the game progressed.

There are some aspects of this design that we'll use again. The Dreamtimer worked as expected, and definitely penalized players for stuff we thought would be bad for the game. We'll consider possible tweaks, but that style of deadline battery will show up again in future game designs of ours. Fortunately, in this game there was very little posting behavior we wanted to penalize aside from a few really reeeeaaaallllyyy slow real-life days.

[Brian Skies]

I agree with you that town didn't get much help.

I just think that if the dreams were more explicit in what they did, scum would've been in a really bad spot. All they got was a 1-Shot Global Roleblock. On the flipside, consider making all the dreams stronger in town's favor. Scum were already very unlikely to get anything from them just based on RNG. Sakura's role made it worse by removing RNG altogether and requiring them to either play well or get on her good side (which would be like finding a needle in a haystack). Reg got lucky this game because not only did he hardbus his buddy for towncred on Day 1, he somehow returned the vest to her as well (which is a very unlikely thing to happen). And it's not like scum ever got anything out of it since they refused to keep the vest for themselves.

On the flipside, had Sakura's choices not gotten wrecked immediately every night, some of these abilities could've turned the tide on scum (aside from Reg, I'm pretty sure she only picked town). Imagine if there were full Cop/Watcher/other roles being given out and scum didn't have anything to combat them with.

I feel like town just had really really bad luck.

The Lover thing was also probably unnecessary, but eh.

I also think you're being too hard on the mods and failing to see how they might have thought this was fair or balanced, all things considered.

[Brian Skies]

Like, was this game perfectly even, no. And I'm not arguing that. I just don't think the setup was as bad as people are making it out to be because we pretty much got the worst case scenario as far as how things played out.

[Sakura Hana]

Another instance of "VCA fucked town up (or at least me) instead of helping"
According to VCA i was scum to mastina
According to VCA Ceph was scum to math
According to VCA one of Desp/Hebi was scum to me.

[Brian Skies]

When scum get a free global roleblock (which kind of BLATANTLY suggests that town power is something other than essentially zero), that's on design.

Also, from what I recall, the ACTUAL town power that was distributed pregame wasn't even affected by the roleblock (albeit not useful, although it probably would've worked out better if this town cared more about coordinating dream votes).

As far as scum not needing to scumhunt PR's, I don't really agree, because you have a mechanic that can essentially hand out more power back to the players and essentially reward good play.

[mhsmith0]

I just think that if the dreams were more explicit in what they did, scum would've been in a really bad spot.

Uhh... how?

Basically zero dreams had the power to carry; the closest by far was the “dead person comes back” but and even that is mediocre and plenty of dead people just shit post anyway. Vig and bus driver a bit dangerous for scum too, except scum can get one or the other anyway.

Dreams like one shot rolecop, temporary hood, bodyguard (the traditional trash town power) etc. ... scum dont really fear any of those. Maybe LLD worries about the rolecop given her claim but 3/4 were goons and vanilla is vanilla.

Like...

1-shot watch
1-shot rolecop
1-shot vig and 1-shot bus driver
Neighborhood
1-shot governor
1-shot dead actions identifier
1-shot Mass motivator
1-shot bodyguard
1-shot BP
1-shot hider
restless spirit

You basically rand one of these every night, and town STILL has no real power to carry. Governor, dead actions identifier, etc. all of those are basically useless.

In, say, a day 3 publicly announced dream vote of governor vs all loved vs yolo random gladiator, there’s no real accountability for who votes where because scum don’t fear any of those. Town probably doesn’t vote the gladiate but so what? Governor is useless anyway, and good fucking luck if scum picks up that PR (which is blatantly possible too, whether Sakura role lives or not).

[Brian Skies]

So basically im currently at.
I need to figure out whether hebichan is actually cleared or not, smith's obviously town regardless but...

Desperado

(5):

NoticeMeSenpai

,

Varsoon

,

hebichan

,

Sakura Hana

,

Nosferatu

hebichan

(1):

Brian Skies

Varsoon

(1): Syryana
Cephrir (1): MariaR

Not Voting (7): Imperium, drealmerz7,

Desperado

, Lady Lambdadelta, hiplop, Regfan, Cephrir

This is something i have a hard time understanding.
If hebichan is town, then that means the entire wagon on Desp at this point was town and scum did nothing.
Which is what i meant by saying that i may need to 1v2 LLD and hebi or at least 1v1 one of them.

FWIW, I thought this was hilarious.

[Sakura Hana]

I would also like to know if my play has improved from where i used to flip out a lot due to scumreads, i mean, they still affect me, as it's obvious they did in this game, even tho i've been trying hard to improve of that, the scars of the past still haunt me and i get anxious just every single time i get scumread or voted, as much as i try to hide it. Tho i think it only showed with NMS, Desp and Drealz.

[hebichan]

Regfan and LLD both played really well and I don't recall seeing a lot of traction heading in the direction of TWIE either.

That's because everyone insisted every day we had to focus on LLD and drealmz and no one let me chase other people.

[Brian Skies]

I just think that if the dreams were more explicit in what they did, scum would've been in a really bad spot.

Uhh... how?

Basically zero dreams had the power to carry; the closest by far was the “dead person comes back” but and even that is mediocre and plenty of dead people just shit post anyway. Vig and bus driver a bit dangerous for scum too, except scum can get one or the other anyway.

Dreams like one shot rolecop, temporary hood, bodyguard (the traditional trash town power) etc. ... scum dont really fear any of those. Maybe LLD worries about the rolecop given her claim but 3/4 were goons and vanilla is vanilla.

Like...

1-shot watch
1-shot rolecop
1-shot vig and 1-shot bus driver
Neighborhood
1-shot governor
1-shot dead actions identifier
1-shot Mass motivator
1-shot bodyguard
1-shot BP
1-shot hider
restless spirit

You basically rand one of these every night, and town STILL has no real power to carry. Governor, dead actions identifier, etc. all of those are basically useless.

In, say, a day 3 publicly announced dream vote of governor vs all loved vs yolo random gladiator, there’s no real accountability for who votes where because scum don’t fear any of those. Town probably doesn’t vote the gladiate but so what? Governor is useless anyway, and good fucking luck if scum picks up that PR (which is blatantly possible too, whether Sakura role lives or not).

You have a 1-Shot Watcher, a 1-Shot Vig, a 1-Shot Governor, and a 1-Shot Hider, and you don't think any of these can help turn the game around? Not to mention you don't even have to worry about someone crumbing it on Day 1 and immediately dying to the scumteam like many players on this site?

I also don't understand why any of these roles have to 'carry' the game? Why can't any of them just be good enough to help the town solve the game and win?

[Sakura Hana]

Well technically scum had to hunt who i would be targeting, which wouldnt have been so hard tbh, either that or i just ended up targeting the most likely NK to begin with.

[mhsmith0]

When scum get a free global roleblock (which kind of BLATANTLY suggests that town power is something other than essentially zero), that's on design.

Also, from what I recall, the ACTUAL town power that was distributed pregame wasn't even affected by the roleblock (albeit not useful, although it probably would've worked out better if this town cared more about coordinating dream votes).

As far as scum not needing to scumhunt PR's, I don't really agree, because you have a mechanic that can essentially hand out more power back to the players and essentially reward good play.

That would be true if the one shots were useful instead of mainly junk. Or if scum didn’t have equivalent odds of getting powers once Sakura died.

I mean shit, man, Sakura dies and scum rands governor and saves scum is an obviously possible outcome (and just TRY to imagine if that happens in LYLO or [preuming mods ban that in MYLO/lylo] brings the game to LYLO/MYLO). Like, we got FAR from the worst rand of it all and it was still blatantly scumsided.

Like, scum governor. Scum vig. Scum bus driver. All realistic outcomes, basically by design.

[Brian Skies]

Regfan and LLD both played really well and I don't recall seeing a lot of traction heading in the direction of TWIE either.

That's because everyone insisted every day we had to focus on LLD and drealmz and no one let me chase other people.

Your play made perfect sense to me. But I don't think you following LLD around and helping her push her wagons was the greatest idea.

[Sakura Hana]

I would also like to remind you that if there's multiple targets in a dream but not global, i only chose the first one.
Murder and mayhem i assume the vig would be chosen by me but the bus driver would still be random.