[GUIDE] Common Mistakes in Setup Making

[callforjudgement]

Excessive swing is, in my experience, a mistake that happens far more often in Closed games than Open games. (The usual cause is flooding the game with roles like Tracker that get much more powerful when there's only one scum left; trackers can get both innos and guilties when there's one scum, but only guilties when there are more.)

We should probably add "broken by circle-targeting" / "broken by pair-targeting" (these are much the same strategy) to the list at the start. Also, "broken by repeated no-lynch". Both of these are fairly common mistakes in making role-heavy Opens.

[callforjudgement]

Anything that allows a player who doesn't have the scum wincon to know the identity of the entire scumteam is broken (this includes all groupscum → something else alignment changes). If you put enough restrictions on to prevent it breaking the game by itself, the restrictions will themselves make the game oppressive.

Post restrictions to prevent players claiming are always a bad idea (and something new mods try surprisingly often).

[callforjudgement]

That's a commonly tried counter (and the one used in, say, Original Newbie to bring town win rates down to around 50%), but it puts scum into a 1v1 right at the start of the game, which is typically seen as undesirable. It also means that scum need to be aware of the optimal strategy for the setup right from the start of D1, which is reasonable on sites which play hundreds of marathon games in a row, but not on a site like this one where a player might only ever play a given setup once.

[callforjudgement]

There are three, mostly unrelated, problems with cults.

Problem 1: Cults, in effect, change the town win condition from "lynch all scum" to "either lynch all scum and don't get culted, or lynch all town and do get culted". The latter win condition is much harder to play towards than the former, because you don't have direct control over whether you get culted or not. (In the extreme case, imagine town mislynches in MyLo. The cult now has to cult someone to win; it doesn't matter who from the cult's point of view, the cult wins either way, but it definitely matters from the point of view of the person who gets culted! Although you can create an exception for MyLo, comparable (but smaller) issues exist even earlier in the game.)

Problem 2: An unmodified standard Cult Leader is so powerful that if they don't die early on, they nearly always win. This makes the game hugely swingy.

Problem 3: If at any point in the game, the setup has a very large town/scum ratio, then scumhunting becomes mostly meaningless and the dayplay is not very interesting, causing everyone to become demoralised.

I believe that problem 2 is fairly easy to fix using modified or variant Cult Leaders or cult mechanics. I would still go as far as saying "don't put an unmodified standard Cult Leader in your game ever", but I'd be less wary about excluding cults as a concept in general for balance reasons.

Problem 3 is a real problem that's caught out good mods in the past; it's the reason we rarely play 11:2 mountainous nowadays, for example. Cult games often have even more extreme town/scum ratios on day 1. In a game consisting of Vanilla Townies + 1 unmodified Cult Leader, optimal play is not to look at your role PM at all, or try to forget what role you have when the mod forces you to, because there is literally reason to play any differently until N1 starts and you have a scumteam. That makes D1 useless for scumhunting, when normally it's the most informative day. This problem is also fixable, but a cult that avoids it will look particularly weird and non-standard.

Problem 1 is the real killer, and the hardest to fix. It's the primary reason why cult games require a warning during signups, to exclude townies who dislike the "town vs. cult" win condition. It looks very hard to fix during setup design; you might be able to do something where townies have some level of control over whether they get culted, but it's hard to see how that would be interesting to play as cult.

I would have no problems with a cult game that had a good solution to all three of these solutions (and would consider playing in it myself if I had the time, but I probably wouldn't). If a game fixed only two out of three, I wouldn't automatically consider it a bad game, and there would probably be people who enjoyed playing it, but I wouldn't consider playing it myself.

[callforjudgement]

I think #1 is the largest of the three problems, so it's probably the right one to mention in the OP.