Well, it surely wasn’t meant as an insult.
Ah I know, me and Arete got into a polite misunderstanding in champs over some language they used on me when we were playing. I drowned them in a river over it the next day in game.
Water under the bridge now.
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very respectable end of an argument, thank you for being kind and polite over the misunderstanding
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Well Arete also vetoed me wanting to turbo scum day 1.
It was complicated.
But I love Arete now.
And now there are no other FM games to sign up to! My job here is done.
True. It’s just a wait until the next game.
Was it fun being a mason? It never happens, but I’m a fan of social roles like that. Medium’s a big one.
Oh, nice game too CRichard. Towards the end, I sussed lol because looking for a player who would be difficult to push so wolves might keep me alive to help push said player…or that player might be wolf and feel it best to leave me alive to discredit my suspicion.
Being masons was great. I think Leafia is one player on the list I have difficulty understanding… Playstyle, based on past game. So being mason made my thinking a lot easier.
I went to Cameron Highlands for vacation. Didn’t expect internet to be down… First time vacay. Should have figured mountainous region isn’t great for internet. But I read snippets here and there. Luckily it was 3d2n vacation, so I didn’t miss too much.
I also don’t know if I know lol the player.
gg, and a million thanks to @CRichardFortressLies
Almost won a game that I helped fuck up ;-;
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yeah i normally do that but i had brought it somewhere that day so i didn’t have it ;-;
Mod Thoughts
What worked:
A “normal” setup with a little bit of pizazz
Fairly balanced setup?
Timely SoD/EoDs
What didn’t work:
Lack of flavor
Long Night times
Toxicity in the middle of the game
The Hitman role
Manifesto:
So, around a decade ago, my home site used to host a Mafia “League” where you would play in these larger normal setups, and your performance in these games would be scored by a group of judges who would be paying attention to your play. (You would also receive feedback on how you played - as someone who was tasked with writing out feedback for every player who played in one of these games, it was tough). The League was kind of a failed experiment because not only was rating people’s mafia play incredibly subjective, it was also difficult to find competent judges who could read through a game they weren’t in as well as offer nuanced feedback.
However, as someone who was pretty involved in my home site’s league, I started to get an appreciation for these 14-20 player simple closed setups, with a solid number of vanilla townies, a handful of PRs, and a fairly robust mafia team consisting of four to five players. In my opinion, these setups are close to what I envision to be classic “mafia” in my mind. You have a large number of players so that wagon analysis is a reliable tool to use on earlier days, and you can get a little creative with the power roles (or even add a neutral) because their strength is lessened with more players in the game. I remember one of the first things I asked on the old FoL was “do you all have any large closed simple setups” and I got a negative answer, so I figured I’d take a stab at designing a setup that struck a balance between the open/mountainous setups that FoL usually runs and the complicated role madness setups on the far end of the spectrum. As for flavor, I just finished watching Kaguya season 3 with my friends and absolutely loved it, so I figured I’d coat this setup up with some light Kaguya flavor and design it that way.
So, how did I do? I feel that this game was pretty much a polar opposite of the last game I hosted on here, in that I was intently focused on setting up an ideal player experience and poured pretty much my heart and soul into hosting that game. That game also ended up being a not-very-close mafia victory.
For this game, I was much less hands-on with the whole experience - I didn’t write flavor, I delegated half of my hosting duties to my co-host, I wasn’t actively reading my own game thread (even more so with the automated vote counts) - yet this game ended up being very close, which is honestly all I can ask for as a host. I think the main lesson here for me is to dis-associate how I feel about my setups a little more and not tie a setup’s worth to its end result. If I can gripe about one general thing, it’s this - designing setups is by-and-large a crapshoot. Players tend to judge whether a setup was fair or not by whether they won; spectators tend to judge a game by whether the game went down to the wire.
In terms of the actual design of this game, I’m pleased to have found an excuse to shoehorn in some of my favorite mafia roles and watch them play out as well as they did. My theory with the setup was to make it slightly townsided (so like, 55/45 in favor of town vs mafia) because FoL has such a high mafia win rate, and I think this setup accomplishes that, with five town PRs that are confirmable and must-kills. The mafia is certainly not lacking in power either, but they’re far more tame than the town - with no easily falseclaimable roles.
Masons are some of my most favorite investigative roles because they’re tremendous fun to play as and they are nowhere near as feels-bad as a cop guilty. Yet, they’re also extremely strong (on par on power level as a cop), especially in smaller games. The Hitman is one of the few neutral roles I consider acceptable and non-swingy (as well as being an interesting challenge to play as), but it had some weird issues in this game that I’ll cover later.
As for what didn’t work, the lack of flavor is a big one. I honestly need to just put in the time before the game even starts to draft some flavor scenes since they’re really tough to write on the go and not having flavor still IMO damages immersion. I was pretty excited because the Kaguya series has a million ways you can write the flavor scenes, but my laziness was at fault here - heck, even when I put up signups for the game thread the role PMs weren’t written out yet. At this point I should probably just accept if I want to host a game with flavor, I should just either suck it up and write some shitty fanfiction beforehand, or get a co-host who is more passionate about writing flavor than me.
Long Night times was an issue that a couple of players pointed out, and some of it was my fault (Day 8 was supposed to start on Thursday, but it wasn’t until Thursday morning I realized that I accidentally set the timer for a day later). Other than that, I think enabling nightskips is good, but I still believe in the integrity aspect of having each living player agree to the nightskip before I implement it.
The toxicity in the middle of the game was tough to take a look at, because some of it was quite incendiary and I probably should have intervened sooner. Not going to name names or talk about this in an extended fashion; it’s just something that I wish I was more on the ball about and wish I stopped before it got more out of hand.
And finally the Hitman role. For starters, I think that Jack played his role excellently and was able to cooperate with the town and win the game, whereas if he played a little closer to his chest, it’s likely he would have gotten executed or potentially nightkilled. However, I do think the role creates some strange scenarios where the town is incentivized with a claimed Hitman to ignore them and hunt the mafia, since the way the town’s win condition is written (Eliminate all threats), the town won’t win unless the Hitman is dead or wins and leaves the game themselves. It creates a very strange situation on my plate where if you allow the Hitman to prevent town from automatically winning the game if all mafia are dead, then that’s actually good for the Hitman, as they can convince the town to execute their target in order for both the town and Hitman to win. Yet if you allow the town to automatically win upon executing all of the mafia, then the town can essentially ignore the Hitman and go after the wolves, when I designed the Hitman role to be troublesome for both sides (yes, they have to kill mafia, but they also need to see a town PR die).
Because of the strange gameplay incentives a claimed neutral/a claimed Hitman created, it has kind of soured my impression on the role and I am unsure if including it in future games would be net fun for players. I like the Hitman role conceptually because if you don’t claim and cooperate with the town, then the incentive and goal for you as a player is very different from normally randing town or mafia, and that’s what strikes me as appealing about the role. It certainly led to situations where Jack essentially had no reason to post, which I find to be not a great thing about the role. I guess my question is, what do the players think about it? Did it inject some interesting gameplay scenarios for you, or did you think it wasn’t very fun to play around?
As for the play - when I randed alignments, I thought the wolves were going to get blown out of the water. Not only did most of the PRs rand onto more unconventional/LHF/hard to read players (Leafia/Phraze/pigeon/Zorvo) but it’s hard for me to imagine a scumteam not in shambles playing versus a town team comprised of catbae/Achromatic/Vulgard/Marluxion. This was further reinforced when the town engineered two wolf/wolf wagons on Day 1 - plus the factional nightkill on Marluxion failed.
There was a silver lining to this, however: By the start of Day 2, virtually all of the town PRs claimed, which meant that the wolves knew what to play around with their roleblock and could map their nightkills and their plays to outmaneuver the town. In addition to this, the wolfteam (more specifically beancat) made a very risky gambit that paid off for them immensely, and allowed them to ML Achromatic and catbae, two of the stronger villagers on the site. This play was claiming town roleblocker on a night where the factional NK failed. This claim injected a stream of wine into the game thread and focused the thread on Achromatic/catbae wagons for D2/D3, which was precisely what the wolfteam needed to get back into the game. Mislunching these strong townies gave the wolfteam additional nights to kill off some of the stronger town PRs (pigeon/Vulgard). beancat essentially traded her life for two mislunches, which was a very strong trade in my book. Essentially, it was pretty much anyone’s game after Day 4.
I think this game could have gone immensely differently if Kanave randed Demisha’s role, or if I decided in the ruleset to not refund roleblocked shots, or Jack decided to gun down Marluxion over Demisha N4, as Demisha was setting themselves deep by pocketing most of the stronger townies and distancing from their teammates. However, Jack killed Demisha with his shot, and suddenly it was 8 vs 1 (CRichard). The town would normally be in a stellar spot, but due to the presence of Jack winning, it allowed the game to move from odds to evens, costing the town a mislunch.
I think the town got fairly complacent during these days, and it’s what CRichard exactly needed to make the game as close as it was. Zorvo got himself executed even though lol had a strong townread on him, and the town pretty much unanimously agreed to execute eliza. Couple this with Marluna falseclaiming even-night watcher unprompted as VT + voting lol randomly, and suddenly the game looked extremely winnable for the wolves in f4. The game’s outcome was pretty much left to Magnus, who had a clear head and correctly PoE’d CRichard as the last wolf. This allowed him to make the correct plays in the endgame here - voting sleep to reverse Marluna’s mistake and quickly hammering CRichard in f3.
Town MVP: In my mind, there are only three players who deserve town MVP status. Leafia is the first who I’d like to shout out - her claiming masons D1 was a little unconventional, but it allowed her to be a trusted town voice when she was correct on most of her reads this game (latching onto Kanave early, being correct on Demisha when most players weren’t). lol is another player who I thought had fairly accurate reads and did an excellent job of being relatively townread and unsuspected for most of the game.
However, because I’m a sucker for great endgame play, I have to give this to Magnus here. He essentially was singularly responsible for winning the game for the town here at the end - by objectively judging behavior and interactions to figure out the wolf was CRichard at the end there as opposed to lol or Marluna. Even though he was a little under the radar and didn’t have a whole lot of thread impact, he stepped up to the plate where it mattered and I think that deserves props and recognition, especially on FoL where players throw in endgame all the time
Mafia MVP: A couple of options in my mind here as well. beancat, despite not having the best social play, took a risky gambit and it absolutely let the mafia team get back into the game by claiming roleblocker on a night where the kill failed. Demisha had a lot of passion for the game and was poised to go deep IMO if he wasn’t the unfortunately in Jack’s hitlist. However, I think I have to give it to CRichard because he did an excellent job replacing in, getting caught up to the events of the game, and taking strong advantage of the town’s complacency to secure two mislunches prior to final 4. I think if he played the endgame slightly stronger (responding to Magnus’s interrogations in a better way, potentially focusing on executing Marluna in f4 because he knew that she was lying about her watcher claim) he could have very easily pulled out the come-from-behind victory for the wolfteam. The game was literally hanging by a thread a couple of days ago - it was that close.
And those are mostly my thoughts on this game! If you’ve read along so far, congratulations, I don’t think most people would. Not super sure on the next game I’ll be designing but hopefully it’ll be a good one.
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good
this reminded me of why you should never say seth isnt w/w with anyone
that just carried me and him to endgame, and gave me the exe choice because i made the most sense out of me and him
also i decently read this game, hitman didn’t seem to cause too much problems, but i wasn’t playing and im subjective to neat neutrals
but hitman was decently town sized, especially with a maf target and the only possible other tk to get rid of them pulled a funny n1 shot
other than that, it seems like a regular waste of time to kill a hitman rather than an exe, but making it much more neutral/even maf sided would probably reduce the problem a bit
Yeah I agree with the MVP’s:
Town - Magnus + Leafia
Wolf - CRichard + Beancat
Leafia was towns best and strongest voice
Magnus did the game winning play and had the Townie voice at the end when it really mattered.
Beancat’s play was sacrificial but overall it ended in a positive way for their team.
CRichard replaced in from a slot that was very wolfy to me and made themselves seem very Townie.
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my god we actually won
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this is so sad
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Marluxion literally said they were super happy to execute me.
i am happy about it now i wasnt happy about it during the game
u would have definetly tried to kill some town
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it brought me a very unique form of peace
i thought for about 2 seconds what final 5 with you alive would be like and then stopped considering anything else
if you were the last wolf it was a dub
if you weren’t it was still a dub