VARSOON'S GUIDE TO MODDING

[callforjudgement]

You should NEVER allow town to clear equal to or more players than the scum team.

I think an important clarification is needed here: "at the same time, especially lategame". Clearing 3 players over the course of the game in a typical 10:3 is not only not harmful, it's about the expected number (or even a little less than the expected number) for a game to be balanced.

However, the reason that this is balanced is that if a player is cleared enough, scum can normally just kill them before town get more clears and dominate the game. Having a number of clears exceeding the number of scum at lylo is an obvious, and not very interesting, town victory. If you're running a 10:3 and three of your players are intended to be cleared by night mechanics, you should make those clears happen in different ways at different times, so that by the time the game reaches, say, a 3:2 ending, there's only one fully cleared and one circumstantially cleared player left.

Also bear in mind that players can be cleared by setup speculation too. I normally aim for about one player cleared by setup speculation and three cleared by role mechanics when I'm balancing a 10:3. (This might seem massively townsided to players who aren't used to balancing setups, but experience shows that something like that is necessary.)

[callforjudgement]

You should probably have a mod PT. Among other things, that lets you give access to a listmod so that the game can be recovered if you have to take an extended V/LA for some reason. You can then make the PT public when the game's over to give the players an accurate record of everything that happened (which is something that they often care about, because Mafia games typically have a lot of hidden information). I think that most listmods are happy to create PTs for use by moderators planning a game (or you could just find a backup mod or reviewer who can create one for you; if it's a Closed game, you'll need a reviewer anyway, and if it's an Open, there's not much point in taking notes until the playerlist has been locked in and you'll have PT powers at that point).

Here's an example of a mod PT for a simple Open. I did the role randomization using dice tags in the PT, but some mods prefer random.org.