big if true
2 Likes
on one hand this game sucked
on the other hand it was funny and i got to just say abject nonsense in thread
so i mean like, on balance, this was a net gain for the world
This game was a lot. I knew this game would be a lot when I first thought about designing it. I didn’t realize quite how much. I think I had in mind some kind of 12-17 player romp through a puzzling game. As I was designing, I didn’t really bounce ideas off of someone, and long before the point when the game was a 20+ player dumpster fire, I should have known better.
People have marveled in the past at how I’ve designed a lot of mafia games and how some of them have taken years to design. It’s what I considered normal when I started designing mafia games. Between my own designs and heavy involvement as a codesigner/cohost, it is possible that I have been an active contributor to at least about 80 setups in the past 5 years, and my active creative effort dropped off significantly prior to the start of the pandemic. I will readily admit that this game didn’t get nearly enough design or development time and needed another person more thoroughly involved in the core design and development beyond the group that we had.
The Team
@Geyde, while around for a lot of the process of brainstorming, really jumped in on reviewing and providing input relatively late in the process in January. At that point, the game had already scaled up from the handful of ideas I’d had back in June of 2021 (and earlier; the original barebones concepts were from back in 2018). I could tell (even if I didn’t want to admit it) that there was too much and despite Geyde being on board with the idea of the game, despite him being possibly the second-most-aware person in terms of mechanics, I think it’s fair to say that he didn’t have enough of a part in the design of the game to be as engaged as either of us would have liked. Oh well. I don’t think this setup would have been completed when it did without Geyde providing the input that he did.
@Silviu200530 came in near the end of the process of getting the game going and caught up surprisingly fast. In retrospect, I think I should have talked through things with him more. I think he could have been more engaged, and in turn, more utilized to take some of the work off my back. As is, he was a lifesaver at times since I just couldn’t be around a lot of the time.
@DatBird joined into the process later on when it became clear that what at the time could barely be called a game still hadn’t really undergone a rigourous review process. He very appropriately read me the riot act. While I do think that our narrowing things down in review was not entirely well-directed, the setup did transform over the course of about a week from a way bigger mess of everything that I had brainstormed for essentially 4 absurd games worth of content, into the 2.5 or so that was there instead. Still a mess, but playable instead of disastrous. I took things way too personally, and was begrudging and testy during this process to a severe fault. I should have recognized that as early signs of this game being too much.
I think that some of my protests could have been reasonable at times. There is something to be said for stylistic choices and trusting in the ability of the players and the hosts. But my reactions were too much. I was acting immature. I’ve seen the other side of this plenty of times, and I feel like a bellend for not showing more respect and appreciation for Dat in the process of getting this game off the ground. He certainly had an excess of patience and he would have been well within his rights to postpone or cancel the game entirely and tell me to shove it, even beyond how I was acting on an interpersonal level.
@juliets came in clutch with coordinating the Syndicate side of things. I feel that Syndicate shifted that mechanic from annoying at best into a net positive.
The Process
I repeatedly made a mistake in design with this game that I’ve occasionally made in the past: I routinely stuck to vestiges of my early ideas at times when I should have scrapped them entirely. It was one thing to do this with the layers and hidden rules structure of the game. That isn’t something I see as a mistake.
It was a problem that I did not form cohesion around the elements which were solid. I kept elements for which I was already aware they weren’t great, just because I was trying to rush things. The worst elements to handle, the ones that in the back of my head, I kept telling myself during design, particularly later on, that I should really eradicate with great prejudice, since I’d wipe myself out trying to handle them, still didn’t entirely vanish. The censored words, voting system swaps, and staggered phases come to mind. The setup definitely needed more time and communication to design and review than it got.
And yet, I do feel proud of the achievement it feels to have ran this game to its conclusion with a comfortable majority of players enjoying the concepts within. That said, it sucks that a vocal roughly 16-17% (I counted 6+ out of 37 not counting travelers or modkills) of the players did not enjoy themselves. I’m not about to call you out individually here, but I can say that for what it’s worth, I hope there were at least parts of this that were enjoyable and I personally do not intend to run a game of this level of absurdity (at least not at anywhere close to this size) again any time soon (if ever).
The Meh-canics
The original version of this game had a whole extra false layer. Had a LOT of vocab-based rules and restrictions. While each false layer could be an interesting game in their own right, the overabundance of them wasn’t clever or exciting. And Dat correctly pointed out that too much was going on, though his focus was on the time the game would take. I think in the end the overall length wasn’t insane, but that was only because of a decent amount of luck on our part, and the pacing wasn’t ideal, particularly at the ends.
The crossover between layers was clunky and should have been solved with anticlaim rules rather than with forced positioning. A few of the roles were really unexciting. TreeReaper’s Starry Night role was changed late into the process, but didn’t improve in being a rather lame experience. Millium’s FC Despy needed restrictions.
The speedup mechanics were hit or miss. The game needed to spread out its speeding up better, not have giant bursts of nonsense. The April 5th WotM fix to remove phase length manipulation was a necessary evil that I hated to have to include, and an April 19th Speed Up mechanic ended up being WotM’d out of the game just before it would happen because it would have been absurdly unfair.
We needed a lot more to reveal the rules. For me at least, the core mechanics of this game that were most exciting and most central to the design were the following:
- Puzzles (Needed to do more with this in a more involved manner.)
- Hidden Rules (Did some to focus on this but not quite enough.)
- ??? Semifaction (This did too much and too little at the same time. Even with WotM to make it easier, it still didn’t get to the final reward by endgame.)
- Multiple Layers (Did too much to focus on this rather than making it a minor element or even scrapping it altogether.)
- Site Swapping (Needed to do way more with this and it really belongs in at least a semi-open setup.)
- Spec Chat Interaction (I didn’t incentivize or smooth this out enough and it ended up feeling like a chore for spectators.)
- IRL-Day-Specific Effects (I hated this element. I still hate this element. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking with this; there was no way we could handle it smoothly.)
The game needed fewer chats. While they aren’t usually a negative for balance, I’m less and less convinced that they’re better than neutral on average in terms of player experience, especially in multitude.
The Ugly
I’m not going to talk more than a little bit about the modkills here. Bigotry has no place in a social game or in this community. And the series of absurd, old-fashioned racism both in the game and in private was beyond ridiculous. And every time I give more than one warning for OGI/Angleshooting to the same player during a game, I feel like I should harshly switch back towards a strict 1-strike system of OGI/Angleshooting. And when it’s several warnings, to someone who has the experience to know better… Enough said.
The Good
On the more positive side of things, I think a lot of the little references here and there did work when they were visible. And with a few exceptions, people did seem to like their roles.
I really liked the puzzle stylings of this game. I wish I had explored that more. I KNOW that’s a strength of my designs sometimes. Some of the core underlying systems of the game are things I will likely keep around for later. Specifically some of the less bastard glue that made it a mafia game. At its core, this game was a mafia game, and while the informed minority factions died too easily, particularly due to lack of fulfilling anticlaim, I think if the best of the two layers had been combined plus a harsh anticlaim mechanic that was relatively public, that could have made for a much more fulfilling game overall.
The alignment check inaccuracy comes to mind in particular as something that I want to play with more later in a more mild form. This game wasn’t really the right testing ground for it, but it’s a way I really like of reducing the swinginess of alignment cops. I think a roughly 12-16% inaccuracy might be the way to go.
Shoutouts
A quick shoutout to @Millium, @Cream, @Arctic, and @TreeReaper for some particularly exemplary play this game.
And a quick shoutout to @OwlsWriteLetters (@NANOOK and @Lumi) for being exceedingly respectful about their critiques both during and after the game.
In Conclusion
A lot of the game was the right degree of silliness, it just needed more dialing-in. More focus. I would say about 2/3rds of the game worked at least decently. Maybe 1/2 of the game even worked well. That might be too generous. But moral of the story above anything else is to go into this sort of thing with a team and have each others’ backs.
I have been stepping back from design altogether since hosting hasn’t usually been very fun for me for years now and finding someone else to host the games I’ve designed is, well, inconvenient at best. The handful of games I still have in my backlog are all much more straight-forward concepts.
Rubber Band Mafia is up in signups, a much simpler game, and then I’ll probably take a break from hosting altogether for a while and lick my wounds, so to speak, as I consider what I’m doing going forward, finishing unfinished game designs, and focusing more on real life.
Thanks again for making this Frankenstein’s Monster of a game into a reality, and I look forward to seeing you all around!
— Osieorb18
8 Likes
Many have asked, “what is mafia?”
Some say its the players
Some say its the hosts
Some say its the setup
Other’s,dared asked;“when does mafia become a ttrpg game?”
Today;Osie has decided to show us that,Despite being a custom cs with a lot of hidden mechanics and puzzle solving setups,you can still have fun while still keeping to mafia,mostly.
[i then got bored of writing this]
Great game;i think dkkoba being the first death was just…painful.
Not much else to add;def was balance issues because cs but eh that doesnt matter,I had a good time playing it
Cheers and thanks for the game.
Shoutout to letting me banword mafia even though i did it nearly the same time i got hammered
-seon
6 Likes
Why does he host have a wincon? This isn’t nuf
2 Likes
You keep saying that, but…
I mean, ok, i actually hate the “It’S nAwT rEaL mAfIa” debate, but, like, if this is something thats going to be asserted…i dont really see how it can be true given the start of the game and the amount of alignment changes.
5 Likes
I think if you remove the massclaim and massdeaths from the picture, the flow between layers becomes much smoother and much closer to the idea I had intended, that focuses more on the core as a mafia game, just with inverted faction names. Even with those, while I’m not about to say the massclaim and massdeaths didn’t detract from the experience, the false alignments and buildup to the core part of the game don’t remove the core part of the game as a concept. I would definitely fuse the core with Starry Night though overall since I think that there are elements of each that work well, but each one had its flaws. The idea of a fusion unintentionally reminds of a Game of Thrones mafia variation where on top of regular factions, there were separate subfactions that had their own wincons, and players achieved ranging numbers of wincons from 1-5. This was something that was briefly touched on but not really explored here.
2 Likes
what did I miss wtf
1 Like
I mean, if the argument has to resort to “if X Y and Z were different than id definitely be right!” It’s not a particularly strong argument, yeah?
Ignoring the fact that nobody had a role pm for the first (12? 24? I forget) hours of the game but were still expected to play…
And players being incentivized to screw over partners from their previous alignments…
Like
Again, i hate arguments about whether something is Real Mafia or not, and yet, here i am, being that guy in post.
4 Likes
I do think there’s room for the layers idea to work, it just maybe wasnt implemented as well as possible here
2 Likes
the only true mafia game can be found in the 18th circle of hell
once someone played a game like that, they can never go back to wimpy mountains and will continue to spiral down the burnt path of destruction
3 Likes
Yeah but that’s not really the argument, this is:
1 Like
This was a pretty big issue, tbh.
4 Likes
Were there any mod errors?
Yes, but not gamebreaking ones.
3 Likes
That’s honesty impressive
1 Like
It’s an uncompelling argument to me, but 
I dont really care to continue it atp tbh, it just seemed like a…dicey assertion
3 Likes
There were intentional wotm changes to alter what was going to happen, but in terms of actual errors:
- Some stuff happened earlier/later than it should have.
- Some typos here and there which were generally fixed quickly.
- I kept forgetting OWLs’ passive and then having to correct myself.
- I made a neighbourhood with Katze and Windward instead of Katze and FoolsGold.
- Timing of the staggered Night phases was cursed.
- I had typo’d on OWLs’ Core PM in particular; 10000 words was supposed to be 10000 characters.
- I completely forgot that Whysper had doused Misleaders and ended up handling it by forcing the targeting on the following round.
- I missed at least one Monty Hall that might have killed TreeReaper, but ehh.
In terms of some of the WotM:
- The “Hosts can catch stuff later than originally intended” rule was a much needed stopgap to handwave little mistakes.
- We added the April 5th rule to remove the phase inconsistencies and speed things up.
- We removed an April 19th “Sudden Death” rule which was mainly there to fix the site swaps if the reason for them wasn’t known and would have been unfair in XLo.
- The “Gojira Roulette” I gave Millium was improvised on the spot to speed things up.
- Rule reveals were somewhat at host discretion.
- Align got slowed down from every 24 hours to every Day phase.
- The neighbourhoods with the host were not intended to be as pivotal in giving hints, but I realized people needed the help.
- The Censored Words rule could have gone off repeatedly but I decided very early on that was a bad idea.
- The shop was opened in early mid-Day instead of at the start of any Day.
- I removed a Sunday, April 17th rule from the game after missing it on the 10th when it originally would have happened. It wasn’t very fun or impactful, iirc, though to be fair none of the date-specific rules worked amazingly well outside of Chess Day, in no small part because my sleep schedule had turned non-existent by that point.
- I added “Prods can remove someone’s invite status for the purpose of priority lists, at host discretion” as a rule because that was how I had intended to run that and my wording on the April 2nd rule was bad.
- The cult wincon was originally impossible and got shifted to be a bit easy, though more because of the abilities and timing of the cult, which would have happened anyways, just ending with a slightly different selection of wins.
- The rule numbers were intentionally silly enough to be a joke.
- Trivia was speedrunned since it sorta had to be for it to be remotely fair.
2 Likes
I was only alive until like D5 but if you want to know my main criticisms
-
I’d have loved the shop to be open and was disappointed it wasn’t opened before I died. More of a personal critique, I love shop mechanics personally. They can give life to roles which you may dislike/be underpowered.
-
When I die, and I think this goes for a majority of games, I want to die for a reason. Semi-rng deaths are fine but pure rng kinda sucks (I am under the impression the meteor that killed me was pure RNG. Please let me know if this is wrong.) I noticed some other people mention this and I’ve seen it mentioned before in past setups and it’s always turned out unpleasant
-
Having a mason partner in a game where you can’t be certain your partner is aligned with you and will be at all times was horrific. We couldn’t function as a proper masonry. Idk if this was a me problem/skill issue but meh.
2 Likes