Design Principles for Mafia Games Aside From Balance, Etc?

[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

[Gamma Emerald]

no it doesn't

[Gamma Emerald]

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