The little N4 stunt may have saved Chomps, oh well
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Undeniable one of the fun games.
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You are not the only person getting sick, I ffeel for ya.
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Thank you.
On that note, directed toward everybody, not just Frostwolf103, I’d appreciate any feedback on the setup, as I am working on designing another game for this site. I’d like to gauge what standards people prefer for role madness games here.
A few questions I’m particularly interested in learning the answers to:
- What roles did you particularly like or dislike?
- Did you enjoy the general power level of the roles? Were there any specific roles you found to be overly strong or overly weak (to an unpleasant degree)?
- Did you feel mechanics had too much, too little, or the right amount of impact on the outcome of the game’s outcome?
- How did you feel about the gamble system? Did it particularly add to your enjoyment? Do such gimmicks make you more likely to sign up for a game in general?
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Agreed.
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Undoubtedly: Reverse Tracker. I am the type of setup designer that craves new forms of roles, and I daresay without any hesitation that this role is something I have not seen before. On top of witnessing a fresh role, I believe the mechanic of the role is very good as well. It confirms the existence of some visits’ targets, while also being able to learn the visitors of those visits.
Coming in close second were the pair of Watcher/Tracker duo. Players never learn to not “clear” a player based on roles alone, and I can only pray that this game will be yet another experience that will eventually build up into wisdom that they cannot forget, even if they try to. (It genuinely saddens me that only Derps understands how I feel about this matter.)
Hm... Lemme review the roles' power level real quick.
- Reverse Tracker: Good investigative.
- Rolecop / Hated-izer: Strong role as it threatens its targets with getting voted. I’d thought people would immediately think this role is Mafia since Rolecop is a generic Mafia Investigative.
As Town Investigative… it depends on the Mafia’s roles. This game’s Mafias don’t have alignment-indicative roles barring Role Thief, so it can’t easily pseudo-redcheck players. With it being unable to act after a successful coercion / rolecheck, I’d say it’s a good role! - Ascetic Fruit Vendor / Self-Role Reveal: It’s an okay role. If I were to angleshoot this role, then I’d townread this role the moment it reveals itself in public, since Mafia doesn’t benefit from this role. If there was a Mafia Ascetic, then it’d be immune to Tracker, but not Watcher.
- Vigilante: Not a fan of the possibility of shooting the user, but since this ability is optional and fits the theme… “Regardless what you say about Chekhov’s Gun, the option to holster is always present. Abandon mech; return to mountainous!”
- Copier: Too weak in retrospect as it does not benefit from winning gambles. We probably could have said that the user can back up any Town role upon success, but IDK how well this would match the flavor.
As for losing its gambles… Yeah, no. That’s a skill issue. If we really want to be lenient on the players, then I guess we could’ve added: “For each failure to backup a Town’s role, you can bet on one additional player’s execution. This resets after a successful backup.” - Vanillaizer / DV: Basically a softer form of Gladiator. I’m okay with it. Especially since it’s 1S anyway. DV is okay as well.
- Doctor / BG / Kill-RBer: It’s an okay protective. Kill-RBer is good as well.
- Watcher: Good role.
- Cond. RBer: Good role of which the value increases as time passes. It’s unfortunate it died early.
- RB’er / Booster: Good role, but the feedbacks being split into two was confusing, to say the least. Additionally, I am against the idea of “people who are supposed to get feedback won’t get informed if they are blocked”.
- Inventor JOAT: During review I’d for some reason thought the user would only be able to win the reward after 5 Nights, even after speedrunning it. I guess I had another vision for this role, but I much prefer the current version. It’s a good role.
- “Follower” (AKA Slave in MU) / Messenger: I am not a fan of this role, at all. Its primary ability serves no purpose other than being misleading, and its gamble ability is only slightly better than a glorified fruit vendor.
- Rolestopper / Dayvig / Neighborizer: It’s a good role. If I had to nitpick, then it’d be that I’d like to swap the gamble ability with the dagvig part of the primary ability since I love neighborhoods. Additionally, this would’ve given the Mafia more incentive to guess correctly.
- Role Thief: It’s a good role, but I’m not a fan of the idea of a role being responsible for an entire mechanic. (I.e., anti-claim mechanic.) After this user’s death, mass claiming becomes inevitable, and without good fakeclaims or ambiguous Mafia roles, Mafia would have disadvantage when they attempt to claim their role. This game doesn’t suffer from the WCS, but this type of strategy cannot be applied for all kinds setups; it’s not versatile.
- Tracker: Good role.
I’d say the (gamble) mech has too little impact. Instead of a mech that is essential to the game, it’s more like “an optional boost that anyone can attempt to get”. I’m actually surprised by the lack of bets at D3 and D4, and IDK why that happened. Did the players simply forget about it?
As for mech as in power roles… I’d say it’s a good amount of impact, but I have a feeling I may be biased due to my constant exposure to rolemadness setups, and my distaste of mountainous setups. In this game, I have seen players getting confused by the events of N4, but they eventually figured out the majority of things.
Time was wasted, but nothing was gained other than understanding of the events. But understanding what happened is irrelevant to the core of FM, which is to make reads on other players.
For instance, I believe that tutuu’s case on lol, despite being wrong, was what players ought to do instead of focusing on who did what and cross-referencing actions.
As someone who likes rolemadness and gimmicks, I definitely enjoy the gamble system, and I would have loved to participate in the game had I been legally able to do so.
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it’s okay, shit happens, not your fault that no one was able to secure a replacement
anyway sorry, I totally mailed this one in. I don’t know if it would have made a difference but it’s disrespectful for me to be giving such a half-assed effort. Need to not actually join games unless I feel some amount of passion for them.
Please don’t do that.
I felt my roles gamble ability was a bit??
I was a doctor and then if I won gamble I became a Roleblocker for kills but I dont think this worked great as
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a lot of situations doctors are on par or better than roleblockers anyway? Especially with assigned factional I think I wld almost always use role as doc tbh. Maybe i just have awful role evaluation and thats wrong tho idk
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I didnt like that if I won gamble i target ppl i think are scum but if i dont i target ppl i townread and that dissonance didnt makr a ton of sense thematically or as a player imo.
Think my gamble should have been lookout & doctor instead or something essentially reading “continue targetting townreads with more upside this time”.
Overall from what little i played i had a lot of fun tho thanks for hosting!!
i liked tutuu’s role as a concept, and like zone said the watcher/tracker pairs were cool, but having two of them felt like too much
unless catbae is trusted, his role basically is just vt, but if he is trusted, his role is super strong, which does make it quite swingy
gambles felt especially useless in the majority of cases
This is fair feedback – the gamble abilities were changed midway through design to be weaker, as the gamble system had overly much influence in the original design of the game – and so the Doctor’s gamble ability was weakened.
Originally, the Doctor could not die from its ability on nights after winning a gamble. This made the kill-roleblocker ability more powerful, as it would always live to tell the tale when functionally redchecking its target (if that target was an unreasonable choice to be targeted by the night kill). With that aspect removed, though, the kill-roleblocker ability makes less sense, as there is only a 50/50 chance of gaining an (ambiguous) redcheck.
What do you mean? There was only one watcher/tracker pair – are you saying that having two roles dedicated to this pair felt wasteful, and the game would have been better if they were two separate roles, or that there were too many investigative roles in the setup overall? Either would be fair feedback, I would just like to know which you mean.
This is good feedback. It is fully correct.
This is also a fair criticism.
My specific thoughts on how this happened: as previously mentioned, the gamble abilities were substantially weakened from their original incarnations because strong gamble abilities create a snowball effect in the game – if a wolf being executed means that the village can block the nightkill and redcheck more wolves, it is hard to come back in the way that Chomps did, which is an unpleasant feeling for the wolves, and if villagers being executed means the village lacks powerful abilities, it is easy to get shut out, which is unpleasant for the village. Reducing the impact of the gamble abilities prevented these outcomes, but it meant the gimmick of the game was somewhat neutered.
I feel the tradeoff was appropriate to have made in this case, though I also erred on the side of weaker abilities. The gamble abilities could have been made more interesting than they were, even if not stronger. That would give a greater motive to use them (fun) without creating excessive swing.
As for future games, there is an easy solution to this problem: do not create gimmicks which are fundamentally tense from a game-design perspective. A more fundamental redesign of the gamble system (perhaps one that rewards correct guesses about the game rather than rewarding correct actions taken in-game, boosting players when they are right against the crowd) could have saved it, but I had intended for this game to be a quick test run and the system was functional when weakened, so I did not want to spend excessive time going back to the drawing board.
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As for me, I felt that my role was extremely wesk.
I do not agree with this criticism. Your role was not unreasonably weak, in my opinion. It was not one of the most powerful roles in the game, but it was up to my standards.
You could, of course, use it as a standard roleblocker, stopping claimed actions you disagreed with (a bad Vigilante shot, for example) and preventing negative wolf abilities from targeting players (the anti-claim was one such wolf ability here).
However, since the role stopped factional actions, unlike other roleblockers in the game, the real strength of the role was using it as a protective, and it was balanced as such: if there was an obvious kill target, you could prevent a specific player from killing them. If the night kill was stopped in this way, you would have a kill save, an approximate redcheck, and an approximate greencheck, a potentially game-winning ability.
The other method of stopping a kill in this game – Hippopablompoyeetus’s role – was loud, so there was not much room for confusion as to what stopped the kill, even though there would still be some ambiguity because of the nature of a closed setup.
This is difficult to pull off early on, as even if there is an obvious kill target, you also have to guess the exact player to carry out the factional kill, which can be difficult with more players alive. However, in end-game scenarios, this role is quite powerful, nearly as much as a standard roleblocker. In scenarios where there is only one wolf left, if you target two players and one of them dies, the other is fully cleared.
Was it in the top half of role power in this game? No, it was probably not. But it certainly was not egregiously weak, and it was not so bad that it was worth allowing yourself to die on Day One over. Compare it to other roles: a Watcher which only gets information that the wolves choose to tell it, a one-shot vanillaizer, a roleblocker which cannot stop kills and boosts its target’s action the following night, an ascetic fruit vendor which only has real power upon winning a gamble, a strongwiller which also hides its target’s visits.
I prefer to design roles whose utility is more niche and relies on careful use and strategy over consistently high-power roles. I find it makes for a more interesting game. Both the village and wolf roles this game followed this principle, even the more powerful ones. I do not think that it is a design flaw to do so, as long as the niche-ness of the roles is taken into account.
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i think i mightve mentally made up one being a pair of watchers and one being a pair of trackers for ??? reasons, sorry
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again, thank you for hosting. there was clearly significant thought put into this game
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I really liked my role.
Only critique is that the gamble ability wasn’t really useful - the neighborhood allowed for information sharing among town members that outweighed the benefit of knowing who my ability was RNGing between - but I imagine this was part of the gamble nerfs.
The idea was that, like any wolf neighborizer, you could use the neighborhood to get claims and gain other players’ trust. The particular way the neighborhood was created – knowing players visited another – means it’s easier to leverage its existence to learn their roles. I find neighborhoods can often be actively anti-town because players are so readily pocketed in them – the trouble with looking villagery in a thread is that you must appeal to a large number of players with contradicting views of villageriness. It is much easier in a neighborhood, where you only need to appeal to one view.
Of course, the benefit only works if you are sufficiently trusted in the particular game and skilled at manipulation, meaning the gamble ability was rather niche. It is much harder to get role claims if you are suspected. This is part of that design philosophy of creating roles that require and reward careful usage.
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I do agree that the gamble ability was situational, and perhaps it was too obviously worse than the other wolf gambles and should have been buffed to make the decision more interesting. It is a fair criticism. I just wanted to share my thoughts on why I had designed it that way.
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@Rhea yeah there is one thing: why does boosted action works the same way as gamble ability activated and ready to use, isn’t about gamble about executing an non-town you picked in first 24 hours?