Maplewood Village - game over - [MATURE CONTENT!]

[Ginngie]

"did I consent to drinking the blood"

[chesskid3]

I mean if you wrote it as a wholly consensual affair

why is there this weird drugging of the tea and is it written to show that that is why he will find her irresistable

cuz thats like a 100% rapey thought process mr. "i intended it as consensual"

[Chara]

then how about apologizing for the way it was presented instead of continuing to defend and having to add to what you'd written, because your intentions clearly did not come across.

pedit: the specifics of "within the next month" also make it sound like magical blood drugs.

[Chara]

quit saying I was defending rape, I certainly am not was not do not, fuck off with that shit

wrap your brain around the fact that things got misunderstood, and that I DO NOT, eh? get it? I don't. can you get it?

"i am deeply sorry i didn't make that clear, and can see how it could come across that way. i'll certainly be more careful writing about such things in the future."

[chesskid3]

dont forget to offer to meet with members of the affected community a la Mel Gibson

[Cabd]

He'd rather die on the hill defending clear date rape as not rape.

[Cabd]

Than to admit he's capable of being wrong.

[drealmerz7]

then how about apologizing for the way it was presented instead of continuing to defend and having to add to what you'd written, because your intentions clearly did not come across.

I did think I had. but to be clear!

Yes, I am sorry it comes off as rape (I can see how it does too now that ppl have said it, for me it wasn't - I have simply been trying to get ppl to understand, it's not "continuing to defend", it's continuing to try and explain, I think being understood / having understanding can be more important than just an apology, but wasn't meaning to not apologize for a bunch of ppl reading something and going GRRRRBLEAHALKDFHALKMNFEWR rape?! certainly the furthest thing from my intentions!) Seriously, I do not like rape at all. I am a super non-aggro guy and it's the farthest thing from my mindset. It is gross and I am sorry it came off like that, I should have been more careful, I could have / have been more explicit with its consensual and enjoyable erotic nature that it was intended to be.

[Almost50]

Hmmm.. the way the conversation is going is reassuring me becoming of age doesn't automatically make you mature. In fact, one can never be considered mature unless they're almost 50 (pun intended, OF COURSE!)

[chesskid3]

dont forget to offer to meet with members of the affected community a la Mel Gibson

[Porkens]

Cabd wins

[drealmerz7]

since the post-info dump spacers are buried a bit I'll share the lynch and stage mechanics here:

first, there were no hammers, just stages as stated in rules (that there WILL be 3 stages, shouldn't think a lynch is going to happen with a hammer if it is Afternoon and Evening hasn't happened, I would have thought is all I'm saying, is what I hoped for / anticipated being able to be discovered before TOO long), but there was majority lynch, but not auto-lynch once a majority was reached

for it to go from Morning to Afternoon, everyone needs to make a post

Afternoon to Evening is on a trigger, Evening gets triggered on a 48hr. countdown if someone gets taken to L-1 (on the condition that I actually do a VC in my mod PT and someone is AT L-1 by the time I am caught up making the vote count - it doesn't autostart just when someone gets marked L-1 as I do the VC, it has to be caught up and still there), or 2 people at L-2, or 3 ppl at L-3. The vote-weights that are null do not count against any of that happening, they only come in to play at EoD when I check / do the lynch status.

Once in Evening was there, anyone aside from the initial person whose L-1 reaching triggered the countdown to stage change (if that person was still at L-1) who would reach L-1 would be given an extra post to make as well as more time added on to the Evening stage. If different players were to alternate getting taken to L-1, more time would get added to the Evening stage. This allows for freedom of changing/shifting/alternate wagons to be not too restricted I hoped but also focused and fun. I also intended it to let wagons form more organically, to allow people to actually be on the player they thought was scum rather than consolidate / compromise so readily for a lynch. Ah well!

Once end of Evening came, a majority of votes was required on a player to make a lynch, but the nulled votes of Kyle Dixon and if Mary Flannigan had vote-drained anyone didn't get counted towards that majority.

hmmm, I think that is mostly it?

OH! There were also unique mechanics during Evening for TIES! that is the other thing of course! I was hoping that ppl would just stick to wagons they wanted with there being no hammer and perhaps ties would be more likely to take place. Kind of like a showdown mechanic, where those tied at end of Evening are the only 2 who can be voted for and their votes don't count. 3 way tie also optional.

If tie is still in place at end of Evening / EoD, there is no lynch. (and again, the null vote weight impact only happens at the moment of lynch, if that makes sense, so if 2 players have 7 votes each but 1 of them is Kyle Dixon, and no other nullvotes are present in the game at the time, then it counts as there being a tie for the tie mechanics, but once EoD comes and I make a lynch [on the player who has actually 7 votes vs. the 6votes because of Kyle's nullvote] or no lynch [where there'd be no lynch on a true tie where no nullvotes are present]

[nancy]

Sorry Ellibereth, but I claim credit for all 4 wolves.

[Varsoon]

I enjoyed this game. I'll hold that it was still a mafia game, but more on that later in this post.

Varsoon you got chesskid/Almost 50 for sure but I'm taking creds for Desp/Cephrir.

I came around hard on Desperado, but I don't think I can claim I was the sole person driving that wagon.
I absolutely did luck out with my shots; I don't want people to get the impression I'm any good at mafia from them, though. With A50, I just shot because that was the first wagon and I wanted to see if my shot would work and generate some content. With chesskid, I had a scumread there, but it was largely from Chesskid's gameplay approach rather than content, though it could be argued that's alignment-indicative or whatever. I played my shots selfishly, is what I'm saying, with little to no actual scumhunting informing them.

I apologize for getting frustrated and saying things that may have been out of line. A lot of frustration came from shooting so well but then still potentially being lynched despite my survivor wincon. I also really want to apologize to Porkens/TPFKAP for giving them such a hard time based on their approach to the game. As you could probably tell from the recent paint mafia, players approaching the game in a very non-traditional way strikes me as manufactured and disingenuous.

@Drealmerz:

Thank you for running this game. Thank you for running such a non-traditional (on this site, at least) style of game; I believe that innovation is incredibly important to designing fun mafia setups--it's why I don't run or even play in normals and opens. Before I write much more, I'm fairly certain our approaches to mafia game design and moderation are very different. Keep that in mind when it comes to criticism, I guess. A lot of people consider the games I run to be outlandish and far from the normal mafia experience. People have called my games 'not mafia' in the past. I consider myself design ethos to be far more 'normal' in many ways than yours, so I hope you understand why people on-site would have such a high objection to this game's moderation and design.

I believe that all public mechanics should have (at least a degree of) transparency to them. In this game, a ton of the player frustration came from not understanding the lynch mechanic. I am not quite sure what hiding the lynch mechanic allows for the game space. I think that the mechanic you have here is interesting and that certain elements of its design could have remained hidden and that players would've enjoyed it, but you need to be upfront about exactly the nature of what is hidden. Make it big and bold so that players get the picture--this phase will end on a certain hidden trigger that is tied to posts made, or votes made, or whatever it may be. Find a balance in what is told and what is hidden. When most of the public mechanics that facilitate the mechanical game of mafia aren't transparent to the majority of the playerbase, your players will almost always lose interest in playing.

I believe that there should be no hidden role interactions/features. I do get your reasoning of not telling a player about certain aspects of their role, but there are other ways to incentivize play. Simply making role mechanics hidden strikes me as less innovative and less fun for the player to play around--it's enjoyable for the moderator, but a player should know the full functionality and intended playstyle of their role. Now, you could, by design, have enablers for abilities people don't start with, as well as other similar interesting not-immediately-apparent-to-the-role-holder-alone caveats, but you have to spend the time to build those into the game.

In the case that you do have hidden role interactions and that not all public mechanics have a reasonable degree of transparency, you should make that incredibly obvious in the advertisement, sign-up, and game thread. You definitely undersold it here. Players will be far more forgiving if they know that the game they are signing up for features, specifically, something that is the non-normal mafia experience. You already advertise your game as a large theme game; why not advertise the other important aspects of the setup in the same degree? Yes, it can be limiting in a design space, but that's easily overcome by moderator innovation. It simply makes for a game in which players are much more likely to enjoy the game, because it is aligned with what they believed they signed on for. You should always assume that, unless said otherwise, players assume normality from setups. I've built a moderator meta on non-normality, and players still approach my games with the same mentality.

I believe, at the end of the day, players still want to play mafia. In my setups, you'll find extensive added rules that strip down the game to very basic mafia mechanics when in LYLO/MYLO, because I know that if players ended up in a situation where the game was decided by non-normal mechanics rather than the basic town v scum regular voting mechanics setup, they will feel the game is not legitimate. By design, no matter how well a game goes for town or how poorly it goes for scum, there should at least be a minimum number of lynches equal to the total number of scum (minus one if there are other kills in the game, though this rule of thumb goes out the window when you start adding extra factions and tons of extra kills). By design, town should never be able to confirm a number of town as town equal to the total number of scum or more--even simply through 'soft-confirms'.

I believe that flavor should do its best not to confirm or deconfirm alignments, though it can reflect mechanics--a good moderator will design reasonable fake-claim flavor for scum such that even if flavor perfectly fits a 'character', it doesn't confirm a player's alignment. Here, I became very unsure how much the flavor spoke towards mechanical aspects of the setup that were not spelled out. I think that doing so creates a very unfair guessing game for players. Some moderators even do this sort of thing in normal setups with different kill flavors, where the kill flavor ("Player X was shot" rather than "Player X was poisoned!") actually reveals something about the mechanical source of the kill.

If it is intended for players to understand something, then make it clear to them in the most basic mechanical terms.

I believe that shorthand for roles is misleading. Telling a player they are a '2-shot doctor' is incredibly misleading; are they just to assume that they have the mafiascum.net normal role 'doctor' and that their role can make use of that two times? When? Day or Night? Is it two shots as in they can only ever take two uses of the ability; what if it fails? Is there a chance for it to be refilled? Can they take both shots at once? Instead of using shorthand that may actually mislead players about the actual functionality of their roles, just type what their abilities and role functionality is, as concisely as possible.

This brings me to a big one;
I believe a moderator should be concise. Obviously, I'm not here, because I'm trying to offer genuine advice/criticism for building fun games, but your flavor writeups, while interesting, were very long-winded. By design, concision always holds player attention more than verbosity; this goes for flavor as well as mechanics.

I believe a moderator should do their best to be impartial. Don't let your own feelings influence the game at all. It really annoyed me that you came out and outright shared aspects of the setup design when given a lot of flak for it while the game was running. I know it can be hard. Trust in what you built. If it breaks, build a better setup next time, but have integrity until the thing is done with.

Finally, I believe a moderator should never inhibit their players unfairly. Not being able to claim my wincon and parts of my role was a very strange thing for me. It mostly just frustrated me. If the concern is that players will 'game' the mechanics of the setup, design a setup that can't be 'gamed' so easily. The other real problem comes in with whether or not a player is softing aspects of their role that they can't claim. It becomes difficult to actually enforce post restrictions without disrupting the game and even you saw how poorly it turned out when you locked thread over that whole Elli mishap. It just isn't worth designing such a thing into a setup. The same kinds of 'restrictions' can be designed into a setup in much more interesting ways for a player to play around. In more than one of my games, I allowed scum/certain players to kill other players but only if they could correctly present the player's flavor name or quote the claim from one of those player's posts; these were featured in games where I made it very clear that flavor-claiming was punishable, by design.

The real short of my criticism here is to design a game with more mechanical transparency and stronger design for player agency.

I'm really interested in the future games that you design and run, but I also want you to do far more innovating. It actually bums me out that you've run a similar iteration of this setup before. Don't cling to something that's done for. Come up with something new. I'd love to be able to run Bloodborne Mafia (except not screwed) or SaGa Frontier or Final Fantasy Tactics again, but those setups got run. They're done. They were awesome setups. I am still proud of them. I can still make use of certain mechanics featured in them, but I won't be returning them as a basis for creating a wholly new setup. I always start from scratch. I don't want someone to be able to just point to another setup I have run and be able to nearly solve a new setup I've designed. I hope that stating my own ethos and grievances with this game's design help a bit in designing your next game. I thought this game had a ton of really cool features, but I literally wasn't aware of them until post-game. For instance, players being able to ask for a journal or submit any action at night is a really cool concept, but when I'm not told, as a player, that it's an option, I default to the 'normal' of assuming that only the night actions on my role card are things I can do.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I've been typing at this for about an hour now, which feels a bit silly. I guess I just want to see you make something really amazing. This game has the makings of it, but fell short for a lot of reasons. I hope that you can understand why people might not have liked this setup. It's okay. Getting combative, though, won't solve anything. Just make the next one better. That's my mantra, at least. Learn what worked, what didn't, and what you could overhaul into something bigger and better. Then do it.

[Ginngie]

That's such a big post yet not once you said my name

My ego is upset

[Varsoon]

I think I literally ignored you for the entirely of the game, Ginngie. Mastina was all "TRUST ME" and so I did.

[Ginngie]

I think I literally ignored you for the entirely of the game, Ginngie. Mastina was all "TRUST ME" and so I did.

Fair enough :3

Also actually taking the time to read your post

you still an OG mod

have you written a guide to modding

[Varsoon]

<3 <3 <3

I haven't written a guide, but it feels like I have to post a lot of the same sorts of lectures when helping people on theme game design. I should probably collect up a lot of what I've written so I can just copy/paste it, but, eh, whatever.

Another setup note for drealmerz: I thought it was really, really cool that you outright said there would be no 'normal' formatting for role PMs and that they'd vary, which can be really helpful if, by design, something about the role pm (if normalized) could be 'gamed'.

[Varsoon]

Most the time, people really need help conveying their theme through mafia mechanics.
Drealmerz has a great handle on that, imo. As much as I wasn't a fan of the lynch mechanics being hidden, it did drive a lot of the hopelessness and frustrations that might be reflective of a town with a werewolf problem. Then again, Bloodborne Mafia did a wonderful job of mechanics conveying a theme atmosphere for players, but it was still a mechanical bust and could've been designed better.

[Porkens]

Thank you Varsoon, I appreciate that!

[TPFKAP]

Me, too.

[penguin_alien]

Also I'm pretty upset about defining rape as consentual here. That's very not okay.

there's no rape

...for the record, there clearly is. I see that this has been discussed thoroughly since then, but yeah, I didn't get the impression from anything that my actions were morally correct in the flavor.

I appreciate the time and thought that went into this game. My main issue is what mastina and others have already said: if this was intended to be a puzzle to be teased apart by playing 20 Questions with the mod, very well, but that needs to be indicated. I generally assume that the game as presented is what we get and that we're meant to play it with the other players rather than with the mod. Especially when the mod is loud and clear about not wanting us to try to break the game--I assume it's being presented to us as wholly as is possible.

I had no idea what my Drain failed, and I doubt I could have figured it out even if I'd obtained two data points, which would have involved both those targets flipping so I could see the difference between success/failure.

I was considering retargeting the same player briefly to see if it was the kill attempt on me that interfered with the Drain execution, especially since I assumed there was a good chance someone interfered with the kill. Plus if Cephrir hadn't actually been a werewolf, Ginngie seemed like a remaining decent candidate.

Also, re: the dead thread comment that I should have claimed my Night One action to help us all figure out that DV's lynch didn't go through because I Drained Ginngie's vote...right, I'm going to claim causing rape flavor on a player who was scumreading me in a situation where if I die I auto-lose. That makes no sense from my perspective as playing to my wincon.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

... The fuck is this shit.

What the FUCK

[Almost50]

@Varsoon: When I play in a game of yours next, and if I have a killing ability, I'm going to shoot YOU first and take control of your modding powers!

An eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood, food for thought, and <insert your favourite clown's name> for presidency.

[Varsoon]

I'm so sorry, A50. I took you out without any hesitation.
Honestly, if anything, this game should be a testament to why you don't give non-scum players kills. The chance for swing is far too high and, while, yeah, it's more exciting to be able to kill someone or whatever, it's that much lamer to just be taken out of the game without expecting it. People with kills get to decide who plays the game and who doesn't, and while we all join mafia games with the reasonable expectation that scum factions will be doing that to players, it's kind of bogus to throw in other kills that can land anywhere, come any time, and aren't an announced/advertised part of the setup.

Which reminds me, god I hate multiball.