"Normal" Grand Idea

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Dwlee99
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"Normal" Grand Idea

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Fri Mar 04, 2022 5:57 am

Post by Dwlee99 »

I've always liked the idea of Grand Idea and have recently been itching to run one, but some of the roles created are a little too ridiculous for my personal taste. I thought about running a game with a bastard element of “If I don’t like a role I’m going to just reroll it” but realized that comes with players being able to make too many mod meta arguments that feel like they shouldn’t have a place in a mafia game.

My idea to rectify this, then, is to make some kind of standard for how to classify a role in Grand Idea as “ridiculous” vs “playable.”

First, I think you should randomize for alignments and roles separately in this setup. Depending on the number of players this could be anything, but in a mini I think 9 - 4 might be appropriate because of the strength of the roles in Grand Idea, or you could even make it multiball if you wanted to.

Next, we define a role to be "normalizable" if it can be expressed as a combination of the roles and modifiers found below (this list is a WIP, feel free to make suggestions for additions):

Roles:
Spoiler: Normal roles
Alien (role)
Ascetic
Babysitter
Bodyguard
Bulletproof
Checker
Commuter
Cop
Deputy
Doctor
Enabler
Encryptor
Finder
Follower
Friendly Neighbor
Fruit Vendor
Goon
Gunsmith
Hider
Informed
Innocent Child
Jack-of-all-trades
Jailkeeper
Mailman
Mason
Miller
Motion Detector
Neapolitan
Neighbor
Neighborizer
Nurse
Psychologist
Role Cop
Role Watcher
Roleblocker
Rolestopper
Serial Killer
Strongman
Townie
Tracker
Traffic Analyst
Traitor
Universal Backup
Vanilla Cop
Vigilante
Visitor
Voyeur
Watcher

Spoiler: Extra Roles WIP
Janitor
Busdriver
Redirector
Framer
Godfather


Modifiers:
Spoiler: Normal Modifiers
Activated
Announcing
Backup
Combined
Complex
Compulsive
Disloyal
Even/Odd Night
Indecisive
Lazy
Loud
Loyal
Macho
Multitasking
Night Specific
Ninja
Non-Consecutive Night
Novice
Personal
Roaming
Simple
Weak
X-Shot

Spoiler: Extra Modifiers WIP
Pregame (Can act before the game begins)
Day
Day-Specific (Ex. Day 2 role can only act on day 2)
Night-specific (Ex. Night 3 role can only act on night 3)
x-Cycle (Role works for specified number of cycles)
Self-Targeting (allows you to self-target)
Self-Targeting-Only (only allows you to self-target)
X-tasking (allows you to perform up to x abilities in the same phase)
<Alignment>-<Modifier that depends on alignment> (ie, lazy prevents a role from acting if there is one scum left, a town-lazy would prevent a role from acting if there is one town left.)
Inverse-<Modifier> (Inverts the meaning of a modifier. Ex: Inverse-Lazy works only when there is one scum left, and doesn’t work when there are more than one scum left.)
<Role>-Immune (Immune from the effects of this role in night actions. If the role is an investigative role, they will receive no result. Example: Strongman-Immune will be immune to the kill piercing of a strongman. If someone was a Strongman-Immune Townie then if they were doctor protected while a strongman attempted to kill them, they would live. If there was no protection they would still die, however.)
Death (Some effect occurs on your death.)
Venge (Some effect occurs on you being eliminated.)


Examples:
Bland would become a Neapolitan-Immune, Vanilla Cop-Immune Vanilla. Note that I didn’t include an alignment because this setup will be generated with roles and alignments separately.

Chessmaster is not normalizable.

Anonymous would become a Compulsive Death Self-Targeting-Only Janitor.

Private Investigator would be normalizable as either Vanilla, Visitor, Private Investigator, or Cop. What to do with roles that act on alignments not in the game is something that needs to be standardized and I’m not sure what the solution is quite yet.

Caveats:

I think that you could run this setup in a bunch of different ways depending on your feelings of setup design. For instance, I would be likely to remove any type of redirection role (busdriver, etc.) because I just don’t like them typically. But when running the setup the full list of allowed modifiers and roles does need to be made public. You would also need to make a decision when running this whether or not “meta cards” would be allowed (ex: Grandest Idea could be either accepted as allowing a player to pick between three roles, or discarded).

I also think that it should be publicly or privately answerable whether the mod believes a role is normalizable and what that normalization would look like as this process is still slightly subjective in nature. This would include answering these questions in a scum thread for the purpose of fake claiming.

There should also be some kind of balance review, or process to remove roles that are game-breaking. For example, an infinite shot day vigilante would of course be game-breaking regardless of the player’s alignment, and should be discarded by some kind of “common sense” metric. Perhaps part of the balance could be choosing the scum to town ratio after the role generation, but that makes the process more subjective which is not ideal.

There also should be some decision made about what to do with scum vigilantes. I think my first thought is simply removing any vigilante abilities from scum, but I think this could also be left to mod discretion when announcing a run of this setup.

Overall: this is for sure a work in progress but I’d like to hear any suggestions for making this into something runnable. I think you could do something similar to Murdercat’s Open Draft to make “expansion packs” of modifiers/roles that could be included based on mod preference. This could mean something like a redirector/deception pack of roles that mess up investigation results, a cult pack, or really anything you want.

I realize this is very open-ended but I wanted to generate discussion with a minimum viable product instead of trying to stress over all the details before sharing the idea.

Example Announcement of Setup"Normal" Grand Idea. 13-player,
9
:
4
town:scum ratio. Roles will be randomized separately from alignment. Each role will be generated by randomly selecting a role from Grand Idea Mafia between posts 0 and 11171 and either discarding it or putting it through a "normalization process" as a combination of roles and modifiers defined below. For a full description of the setup generation process see here.

Spoiler: Allowed Roles
Alien (role)
Ascetic
Babysitter
Bodyguard
Bulletproof
Checker
Commuter
Cop
Deputy
Doctor
Enabler
Encryptor
Finder
Follower
Friendly Neighbor
Fruit Vendor
Goon
Gunsmith
Hider
Informed
Innocent Child
Jack-of-all-trades
Jailkeeper
Mailman
Mason
Miller
Motion Detector
Neapolitan
Neighbor
Neighborizer
Nurse
Psychologist
Role Cop
Role Watcher
Roleblocker
Rolestopper
Serial Killer
Strongman
Townie
Tracker
Traffic Analyst
Traitor
Universal Backup
Vanilla Cop
Vigilante
Visitor
Voyeur
Watcher

Spoiler: Allowed Modifiers
Activated
Announcing
Backup
Combined
Complex
Compulsive
Disloyal
Even/Odd Night
Indecisive
Lazy
Loud
Loyal
Macho
Multitasking
Night Specific
Ninja
Non-Consecutive Night
Novice
Personal
Roaming
Simple
Weak
X-Shot
Pregame
Day
Day-Specific
Night-specific
x-Cycle
Self-Targeting
Self-Targeting-Only
X-tasking
<Alignment>-<Modifier that depends on alignment>
Inverse-<Modifier>
<Role>-Immune
Death
Venge

Spoiler: Mod Discretion
  • Scum vigilantes will have vigilante removed from the role. If the role is unique in some way (ie, the removal of the vigilante would role confirm someone scum), then the player's role will be reranded.
  • Roles that act on factions not present (ie, Seer) will instead act on the main group scum. So a Seer will become a Cop.
  • Roles have the right to be removed during the randing by the mod (me) if they are deemed game-breaking (ie, an infinite shot day vigilante is game-breaking).
  • Meta cards will be reranded instead of given to a player.
I prefer they, thanks :)
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Fri Mar 04, 2022 9:15 am

Post by RH9 »

This feels like an excellent idea.
GTKAS: 2022, 2024

v/la every weekend

indefinite hiatus from mafia solo
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