Mafia is difficult in regards to the dynamic of counterplay and honestly is comparable to DBD in that one side will always have control of the game essentially? In the end, if both factions play perfectly, town should always win. God, I hate mafia sometimes.
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if i assume you’re still talking about host decisions probably not, at least not in the same game?
i feel like this kind of thing can be avoided if there is standardization in what happens when it comes to rulebreaks/. the rolecard just said “something bad might happen”. what does that mean? was there a reason to not tell them what would happen if they broke the contract? does the consequence of them breaking the contract depend on the severity at which it was broken?
i would not be upset about something if it happened as written and i can see evidence that the outcome decided beforehand without bias, and if i was upset after the fact about something as it was stated in the OP then i would just deal with it
there was a similar issue when emilia hosted an SCP rolemadness game a couple years ago, and a few people had post restrictions, but it was never clarified what happened when the post restriction was broken. one guy got modkilled earlier on for it, and at one point someone pointed out that someone should have been modkilled earlier but it was missed, and there was a lot of debate about what should have been done there because i think wolves would have won if they got that extra modkill, even though it should have happened earlier?
you can’t account for everything, but this wasn’t even a forum game rulebreak it was a game mechanic and so it really should have been clarified
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how come? i think that if both factions play perfectly the ideal outcome is f3 with a wolf and a villager crossvoting, with the final villager deciding. assuming hypothetical perfectly balanced setup which doesnt exist for any communities, maybe each community could in theory have their own 50% winrate setup but its unrealistic to get a huge sample size. cop13er was afaik regarded as closest as you can get to a 50/50 setup for a lot of communities
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well if by “play perfectly” you mean - the best they could theoretically do - town always wins yeah, in theory if everyone is a cheater level of good town wins due to having majority
i was speaking from the pov of … like “play perfectly by realistic standards”
realistically nobody is a cheating god, so like, within reason, you know
there is no platonic balance ideal from a host perspectie. some people say “the game reaches f3” but at that point mafia has by definition a 2/3 chance of winning. sure it becomes 50% if a crossvote ends up happening but there’s no way you as a host can ensure that happens every time
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if the internet and forum mafia existed for thousand of years and we had an incredible amount of data all of this could be backed up by numbers but we dont so we can just estimate at best. we dont have enough time to gather enough data too before we die
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Having “something bad might happen” rather than a defined set of rules was necessary because there’s too many obligations that can arise from Mizora to consider all of them and that would allow us to choose the most appropriate solution for the rulebreak
Mizora as a rolecard mostly had a spiritual idea than a written idea because it was so vast - “The spirit of the game” has been a cornerstone of deciding what is angleshooting for godknows how long, and Mizora took the premise of “the spirit” to make contracts in mafia work. It is a role that would need actively developed on for a long period of time to have a decently rigid set of procedure for obligations being broken. It was a very experimental idea. I don’t think anyone had ever seen something like Mizora before until now.
On the SCP game example: yeah, I think a conclusion could be drawn that host involvement in mafia is not ideal because we don’t have the objective of keeping the game at 50/50 odds of winning and it leads to difficult decisions
imo the platonic balance ideal is “everybody walks away from the game feeling like the side that played better won”
it’s why I like SE as a setup so much - there’s been a lot of discussion about whether it’s balanced on paper, but in practice the side that has played better overall has won every single game of it I have ever seen
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whats this setup?
Starship Epiphron
aka Regicide, also used with other flavor sometimes (Airship Zephiphron, Omega Strikers FM, etc.)
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we can all probably agree that my role was just a botc role with botc rulings
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I think its really funny if people consider Mizora as having been a BotC role or BotC inspired but when making decisions on her I did not have the objectives I normally would as an ST
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sidenote
still can’t believe how often vulgard rands lw in my games
She could’ve traded away her right to scumchat and her right to vote on the mafia factional kill to town.
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in the sense that its subjective
players and host conversing and even arguing at times on what should or shoudlnt count as a valid deal or how stuff works to me at least sounds botc-y but maybe its not botc-y i dont know. i associate rigid with mafia and the opposite of rigid with botc. i havent played a lot of botc
well this kinda goes back to what i’m saying about how there’s always gonna be potential for upset if people are given the possibility to believe that an unfair/biased decision was made against them. and they are given the possibility to believe this by hosts making decisions that weren’t clarified in game rulings or mechanics etc
i understand now that the consequences for breaking the contract could probably not be clarified, and so i think the conclusion here is that you probably can’t have a scenario where this role is going to be fair without major tweaking. and that’s a consequence of running experimental roles, there’s a high likelihood that people are gonna feel robbed in some capacity especially if host interference is involved
no I 100% agree that no matter what decision I took people could or would feel like it was unfair toward them
maybe it’s just an expectation in mafia that the host does not take decisions outside of design phase, and I broke this expectation with Mizora
whoops. Oh well, I don’t think I’ll do it again anyway.
I think Mizora broke a lot of expectations 
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ehhhhh its not necessarily a problem
it happens whenever there’s ambiguity literally anywhere, and Mizora was all ambiguity - for example, Arctic could argue that he should’ve never been claimvigged because he only claimed a passive and your anticlaim only worked on people who had claimed ‘abilities’ (even though in this case passives are abilities yes but you get what I mean)
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thank god I’m taking no heat for my objectively bad decisions
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right yeah anti-claim is always gonna have a degree of subjectivity
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