Mini 1898 - Inception Mafia - The Hub (GAME OVER)

[Varsoon]

I don't see enough people prostrating themselves before me.

Yeah, the oversight on the Cop and Reviver roles made this nearly unwinnable by scum by design, which is kind of annoying, especially because I put in a fair amount of work independent of those role interactions.

Unfortunately, outside of those problem roles (which could've randomly rolled into scum hands, talk about SWING), this setup is insanely scum-oriented. I love the concept of going into dreams, but losing at a small deadline, the nature of people being left OUT of a dream, and scum having knowledge of more things that happen deeper in a dream--not to mention abusable kick mechanics, etc.--all of this just works to make this way harder for town to win independent of roles.

PRAISE: I think both teams playing around controlling a cool public mechanic is great. You flavored this awesomely. The execution isn't my favorite, but it is -cool-. Huge congrats to FA for coming up with a lot of this and to Neko and Dunn for running this monstrosity. I know how crazy it can be to run a game with such a complex mechanic at the center of things.

SUGGESTIONS: If I were to make an iteration of this setup, I'd make it a 2-player scumteam, only tell town there are no third party (that way town can't limbo-game the scum numbers the way we did), and give the scum team a few factional abilities. I like the idea of randomly rolled abilities, but I think it'd be much more interesting if those 'afflictions' had some public aspect to them besides their names. Not even getting what the afflictions did on a flip was also a bit of a headache. I'd rework the kick mechanics, how dreaming works, and how players retain viewership of dreams. Honestly, a lot of my fixes would put more work on the moderation side of things, which seems already pretty strained. I think the biggest issue with this game was time being such a huge factor--which makes a ton of flavor sense, but doesn't equate to something fun for anyone to play around as is. Even missing a few hours and then ending up in a new dream made the game near-impossible to keep up with and the delay between a lynch/action and moderator action could prove to be an issue, too. The biggest thing is just designing roles that ARE NOT time sensitive, because I'd be kicking myself in the ass if I was playing a role like McMenno's, got the chance to use it, then lost that opportunity because I wasn't online at the right time. In short, this might work really great as a 24-hour blitz sort of game or even a face-to-face variant.

[Varsoon]

Not Chara, you were a boss. Your play in this game easily swung this into town's favor and kept us from hitting too much apathy/confusion and losing because of that.

Like I said, if you were scum, you deserved the win 100%.

-V

[Varsoon]

I will still hold that my Hiraki push and kick-out were a big winning factor and that's the sort of role interaction and play that should be rewarded in this game, not just copping the right people.

Fuck cops, man, they ruin any game.
Don't put cops in your game.
Cop is a shit role.

[Varsoon]

I was most-hated, but best town, suck it scum.

[Varsoon]

Like, for instance, it's mechanically abusive towards a player to do the following:
Let them enter a dream, where they have viewership access.
Let other players decide they have to go a dream deeper, causing them to LOSE viewership access to the posts in that previous dream that they should rightfully have access to.

Does that make sense? I should, rightfully, be able to at least view all the posts up until I got put in the deeper dream. However, the only way to do this in current Mafia is to make WAY TOO MANY THREADS, A TON OF THREADS, DAMN.

B-sides, the game is far less interesting for people who weren't in the dream, which is ideally where scum want to be. In a perfect scum game, scum don't even play most the game.

[Varsoon]

If you kept the same dreaming system (where people get left behind and the majority of players goes into a dream and people can't lynch in what's left behind), I would give scum heavy incentive to be in dreams, such as factional kill immunity in dreams, factional kills in deeper dreams, etc.

[Varsoon]

Oh, lol, I mean in THIS game. I love being involved as scum. That's what I'm saying. THIS SETUP needs to give scum more reasons to want to go into dreams and play, rather than manage to idle it out and live outside the dream until late-game.

[Varsoon]

<3

[Varsoon]

Don't get me wrong, investigative-type roles can be really neat and pack a lot of cool rhetoric and sleuthing, but cop's just too strong of a mechanical role that, most of the time, the rhetoric of the game is secondary to the cop's mechanical prowess and the game becomes less of the mafia I like (rhetorical) and more of a mechanics-focused 'game'.

[Varsoon]

Basically, I feel like the mechanics should always supplement the rhetoric, rather than rhetoric being built around/secondary to mechanics, if that makes sense.

[Varsoon]

I'd even put in a 1-shot vigilante before a 1-shot cop, because while they both confirm someone else's alignment, the Vigilante is much more interesting to play around after the ability has been used/claimed.

[Varsoon]

Plus it makes bulletproof and redirector interactions more interesting.

Basically, never run cop, cop's dumb.

><
Unless you meant something else.

[Varsoon]

To mitigate swing in affliction randomization, I would secretly ensure some afflictions on go to town.
Dunno if I wrote that already.