OC Elden Ring Mafia Game Thread D9 Deadline 30/08/24 @ 10pm GMT+1

GG all! I actually had fun in this game, and didn't throw for it. Truly a revolutionary Smogon dot com mafia gaming experience.

I had some suspicions about someone in mafia being sheeted after I started getting selectively hooked/SGed (figuring it was ria or Celever), but Yeti and I didn't push that suspicion hard enough to actually investigate and/or expose them. Had it not been for some amazing early-game luck on town’s part (not to mention quick, if messy, organization of town by pulsar and ria), the dirty rat Celever might’ve been our undoing. Thankfully that didn’t end up happening.

Remember: Celever is ALWAYS above rand scum!
 
gg all and thanks for hosting, tommy.

it was a pleasure to work with ria and charlie in the towncore to solve the game - and also NE for the one night you were there. it was also a pleasure to work with celever there but you were not actually town LMAO. ria and charlie both brought a different perspective to the game and trying to figure it out than my own 'circus oc og' mindset which is good because i do not think i am flawless with actions.

flandrs is correct that i let myself be too complacent there was no mole in towncore when he was accurate that his hooking was suspicious; i falsely attributed his hooking to being done by one of the people we told to protect him from a deathmark due to the oddness of realiti never marking anyone else as opposed to celever trying to block info. i think, however, that this made it a little too obvious there was only one hooker in the game, and that it was sunny, especially once we concluded redless' n1 fail was due to dbd sging as he died (not a prio interaction i would use as a host, dying would hook the non-kill action, so it took me longer to get there). i felt it was reasonable town had three different npc checker-sorts because each of them functioned differently, and the arsonist slot was struggling to appear clear.

i do feel vindicated for calling celever out n0/d1 though! i was right that tarnished group wasn't a town scheme! woo. while i still disagree with anyone actually claiming to laurel, especially due to how he went about soliciting info and misreading his pm, i give him credit that his actions let several mafia be caught by the social game. i think it was correct to encourage people not to claim to him on n0, because claiming to anyone unproven n0 is a dangerous idea for town info control ('GE guy' ln, 'class trader' mekkah, and 'tarnished coordinator' celever were all mafia...); it's undeniable he fleshed out more conversation and reads than otherwise would've been possible, so there is clearly room to play an oc not JUST in my optimized way.

fortunately celever was mech outted by mekkah needing to have at least one tarnished teammate. once we punched through former, ag, and then hydro, there would still be what, 6 or 7 villagers alive against just celever? and celever would be the only place to go next as we had verified the class of everyone else. also fortunately, harmony/ria did a great job early flushing out the twin situation and voting mafia kp. without their work i do not think town could withstand the amount of firepower (especially with ln getting the GE list) mafia had, while trying to hunt in the npc pool for realiti/mekkah. other connections started coming together like there being no indication of lechen/sunny's roles existing outside of nights they disobeyed where they should've been, and bluedoom/redless telling people their aliases leaning heavily to town for me.

i hope harmony enjoyed her time leading as a newer player and does it again, along with other newer OCers! it is a lot of work and you can carry a lot of guilt for subpar actions or not catching stuff sooner, so it's not to everyone's liking to lead, but if people want to lead or try it, i hope they can be involved in any upcoming TvM games.

i will say (as i did in the call) i do not think this game was particularly well-suited to my mindset as a leader. once we cleared out the npcs, it required us to start voting in 1v1s/pools of people who could be lying. i do not particularly like to vote someone erroneously and maybe am cautious to a fault to avoid it, so i was comfortable rooting through npcs first before addressing the real-alias-claimers. i prefer having that alignment check confirmation i am or am not doing the right thing, as opposed to just picking whichever of two conflicting claims i might like better, or is less bad to pub reveal. if more mafia kp was available, my reticence to start voting out players could've been devastating, so it was very fortunate ln/saber went down prior to my sheeting so i could play at my speed - even if that speed was a crawl, and not particularly enjoyable for anyone lol.

regarding a couple villagers who fell to the beat of their own drum; realistically there is not anything wrong with playing an oc how you want. however, if you 'disobey orders' i don't think you can really be too surprised when people are not willing to consider sheeting you/giving you info, especially in a game with no way to alignment-check besides flipping you. it's a risk you assume when you choose to play how you want to play. the absolute worst thing you could do is to give erroneous info to town, which is what happened with the jalmont slot and why he was beyond salvation (with no alignment checker to ever clear him) once his alias was found. he told us creme brulee (ditto's GE npc) was a player, which was either intentional miswording by him of his results, or a misunderstanding of what info his role could actually provide due to missing the section about tarnished npc in the op. i suggest future independent villagers to be hesitant in providing info that is not categorically true - if you come up for the vote one day, any clarifications you try to make will be seen as backpedaling. there is a line between playing your own way and griefing your team. we could have cleared out npc aliases much faster if ag and jalmont's roles were switched, for example, as ag was a model citizen of the town. despite having a completely unprovable role, we chose to vote former before ag (as they were in the '1v1' for mekkah's tarnished teammate) due to ag's exemplary track record. equally, i understand former's frustrations as a player who does not wish to just be a sheep. his desire for more agency and knowledge came off as fishing to ria and me at many points, and we were unable to piece together a world in which there was no second mafia tarnished, so he was the most likely candidate. celever being the real one explains our difficulty there!

i will provide some thoughts of mine on the roles in this game for future hosts. these are just my opinions as a player and a game designer, but if you are looking to craft your own OC game, hopefully these will be helpful tidbits:
  • npc pool: this concept has been attempted prior to this game; tommy was warned it was unsuccessful and attempted his own endeavor. both mafia and town agree that rooting through alias pools every night, for multiple nights, is not a particularly rewarding endeavor. it is missing that sense of accomplishment and satisfaction EA was talking about. by the time you find the last mafia/villager in the pool, you're no longer celebrating you did it, but grousing about the time required. i do not think the npc pool concept is a lost cause entirely, IF, and only if, one made every single role interact with npcs in some way. this would let the pool be cleared out faster and give each player agency instead of waiting for some other npc checker to do their thing, or wasting votes clearing the aliases out. one would need to design the game and roles AROUND the pool, as opposed to putting in a couple roles like the npc arsonist and human/npc checker.
  • tarnished second-place learner: i get the appeal and value of this role; my objection is that it's not the most exciting role at night. it does feel rewarding to be able to give that info to town! one thing about it, though, is that until it is verified as town, it is untrustworthy, so any actions that a host expects will be taken due to what a role like this learns, may not happen. what you as the host see as 'obvtown' is not what players itg will see. i don't criticize this role much, but i am a proponent of not having actionless roles (unless they have a sizeable perk, like Gmax's intentionally-vanilla role being immune to temple deaths) in OCs.
  • oneshot-maker, gifter, town backup, whatever harmony's pre-shift was: tommy has owned that making laurel's gift subrole only work if he dies during the day was troll. something you should consider when designing the game is how that role's course of action will likely go. laurel was a deathmarker, town kp, which means mafia are very likely to elim him as soon as they find out about him. he needed to die during the day. his role is provable and very unlikely to be mistaken as mafia once he vigs a mafia alias, so he would only ever die during the day at endgame, when town has lost the tarnished vote. this makes half his role almost impossible to unlock. similarly, dak and alice died actionless. harmony's role was contingent on her phase shifting, and 8 other villagers dying. roles that are so conditional like this are difficult to unlock, so the villager who has them struggles to prove their role and doesn't really have anything to do during the game. they are likely to die never achieving their potential. if you want to put conditional roles into your game, you should consider the likelihood they can actually work.
  • tarnished vote backup: this might be the singlemost troll role in the game, for the same reason as the above. it is essentially a vanilla but it has a night action. the circumstances in which this role could successfully be predicted onto a tarnished who dies the night this role targets it are slim. i guess i don't have a problem with very weak roles having actions so your village is of-size, but has no extra power, but you should consider how easy it is to actually use a role. town knowing which tarnished will die is very difficult.
  • untarnisher: so most of my issue with this one is that, due to the npc move pool and lack of alignment checkers, and what i mentioned about the vote info role, if this role is not conftown it is very hard to trust. in theory this role could untarnish the rest of the game and become the elden lord/gain the vig, HOWEVER, if you do not know it is town, this is an impossible endeavor to embark on. no village would risk this rather-suspicious role being able to seize the vig itself. the lack of info roles on town/ability to have a solid mafia-alias-poe means that this role cannot be used particularly well. for example, we knew mekkah was mafia, and we knew he was tarnished, but without knowing where his alias was, we cannot untarnish him. even if we were sus on him, if we target his npc, we did not actually hinder the mafia in any way. i did rand NE onto mekkah's real alias in what ln called "the most devastating rand" but was that anything i did 'right?' banoffee was just the npc i didn't know about that was next on my alphabetical list when i got to NE's line in my 'scouting for errant safeguards/fails' era. i think this role was well-done thematically for the game, but in the context of the village's other roles, low info, and massive alias pool, it is not one that can be used to much success.
  • single-target ability rogue: this is another i will put with vote backup where it is almost impossible to use correctly. ESPECIALLY with an npc pool. it sounds like a cool concept but when you consider that it has to target a user the exact night that user is targeting it, it is almost impossible to use against the mafia. its main utility is as an alias-confirmer, to validate that the alias someone gave is one they actually have. i don't know if that was tommy's intent for this role? or if it was actually supposed to be an action-blocker/rogue. i put dle on banoffee (an unknown mafia alias) the night he died and all that did was tell us banoffee was not the mafia killer because dle died anyway, even though i randed a mafia alias, and mafia did try to kill him that cycle. it doesn't feel like a very rewarding role most nights and is frustrating as a town leader to use, since i feel like i let him down if i tell him the wrong alias and he dies.
without knowing tommy's intent for some of these roles, and if they were meant to be quasi-vanillas to fill out a town of 22, i can't say how successful these were at what his goals were for them. i would encourage future hosts to think about your goal for each role. what do you hope it can accomplish, how easy is it to do that, and how bad will it be for town (or mafia) if the role is unable to accomplish that difficult task even once? and then, how many of these highly-circumstantial roles does the town have? if the village has a multitude of conditional roles that need very lucky targeting, your town leadership may become frustrated with their inability to 'confirm' anything, as we did here.

another facet of balance is that the mafia will never have a problem with any of the following: misunderstanding a role pm/role, someone idling, a member of their team 'going rogue' and submitting actions without them knowing. town needs some buffers for the natural, shall we say, volatility of individual villagers just not subbing their action or struggling to understand it. i agree that most of the villager misunderstandings were not ACTUALLY tommy's fault, but, as a host you need to make sure your role pm and its formatting is clear for everyone. it may be a little uglier to make the formatting very blatant about what an action is and what it does, but it will prevent people salting at each other or at you.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U0_gDfT0xvYR1avZ1QWnnUSyyviS22hIyOhydGWbNL4/edit?usp=sharing here is the village sheet for anyone who didn't see it in discord.

i think that is all i have to say on this one so gg again all, very nice towncore to be a part of even if the solving mechanics were frustrating for us. i hope to see more OCs innovating TvM designs!
 
I will, say, if you want to save OC and making it more exciting. And you know...not repeat what caused it to die in the first place:

Do not:
  • Hoard all information. Yes it's optimal! But it's super sweaty and locks people out of the game. Certainly figure out what can and can't be shared, but it's good for everyone to post information on votes and to actively communicate what you can to players, especially those interested in being involved.
  • Accuse people of being mafia for asking question. What town core did to me is extremely toxic and I feel owed an apology by them.

Do:
  • Actively encourage people to ask questions and get information through out the game. Totally understandable to say "Sorry, can't share that with you" to certain questions and totally valid to think someone might be fishing for information. But if you take the time to explore other OC communities like I have, you understand that everywhere else it's completely normal for people to ask questions. In my experience, Smogon is the weird ugly duckling here. (and yes, saying everywhere is an exaggeration, but seriously, no where else I've played would have ever nominated someone for a vote just because they asked questions).
  • Assume that the game can't be completely mechanically solved. Mafia is a social game and anything called mafia always should be. Mechanics help, but town core seemingly had a distinct lack of social reading that led to weird votes.
  • Be aware of how you're treating people as town core. I felt like Yeti was extremely rude towards me one of the later nights. So I said to heck with it, I'm doing my own thing and not following town if they're going to act that way towards me.
  • Be appreciative towards hosts even if you're raging at game design.
 
The negativity in this game was really off-putting. So much whining when there was fundamentally nothing wrong with the setup. Just play the game for god's sake. People supposedly don't want to play town v mafia using the same strategies but then complain when the game doesn't go exactly how they expect. Why even host this format? At least in multifaction the probability of any given person getting to do something interesting is so much higher.

I have a lot more to say about that but I'll refrain for now. Thank you for hosting dusk.
 
I thought the set up was really cool lol. I know town complained the whole time but it was just cause Celever had the sheet that town PRs kept dying.

No role cop is really interesting.

My claim was rushed but it served it’s purpose! I’d rather have everyone think I am scum but be able to prove I am town then let town get moled.

thanks for hosting tommy!
 
some thoughts as someone who was townleading for her first time:
1) i was not a very good or well put together town leader but i did the job and im happy with that & glad i got the chance & hope to do it again. it was fun if overwhelming at times.
2) my role was fucked. either i townlead or i do nothing all game (i could talk to people but like, i have no info of meaning to give them theres no reason why they should trust me, what am i doing). at least give me like a 1 shot fruit vendor or some shit
3) npcs suck
4) this game went way too fucking long
5) people need to stop begging to be in towncore. you will be added if & when the towncore thinks you are town to a sufficient degree. sit down and shut up. you can politely ask once if you want in private (i think bluedoom did this)
6) aliases are a Mixed Bag but i personally dont like them because they just make every action that much more clunkier
7) town being incapable to clear anyone was quite annoying

ill add more thoughts later but i do think this game was uh. deeply flawed and would advise future designers to learn from the faults
 
I
JALMONT said:
The negativity in this game was really off-putting. So much whining when there was fundamentally nothing wrong with the setup. Just play the game for god's sake. People supposedly don't want to play town v mafia using the same strategies but then complain when the game doesn't go exactly how they expect. Why even host this format? At least in multifaction the probability of any given person getting to do something interesting is so much higher.

I have a lot more to say about that but I'll refrain for now. Thank you for hosting dusk.
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you intentionally played -ev because you weren't getting townread immediately. there is no benefit to lying to a mechanically clear player
 
Attempting to tank town win chances because you feel like the game isn't Spicy enough from your pov and you're bored means mafia is not a game for you, harsh facts but they need to be said. There's plenty of ways to make the game interesting socially if you care to try instead of trying to be a hero mechanically.
 
That being said, former was treated unfairly and you could see social solving attempts from them in main chat and they were actually unfairly assumed to be Mafia because they played slightly off meta (but didn't lie as far as I'm aware)
 
DkKoba said:
I

you intentionally played -ev because you weren't getting townread immediately. there is no benefit to lying to a mechanically clear player
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None of what you just wrote about me is true or even relevant to what I posted. I never said anything about myself, my gameplay, or even how I personally was treated. You should stop assuming things about people, but perhaps it’s to be expected when you are a 28 year old acting like a 8 year old on discord. Maybe it’s you who’s been playing mafia too much!
 
JALMONT said:
None of what you just wrote about me is true or even relevant to what I posted. I never said anything about myself, my gameplay, or even how I personally was treated. You should stop assuming things about people, but perhaps it’s to be expected when you are a 28 year old acting like a 8 year old on discord. Maybe it’s you who’s been playing mafia too much!
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JALMONT said:
None of what you just wrote about me is true or even relevant to what I posted. I never said anything about myself, my gameplay, or even how I personally was treated. You should stop assuming things about people, but perhaps it’s to be expected when you are a 28 year old acting like a 8 year old on discord. Maybe it’s you who’s been playing mafia too much!
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You're right that I play too much mafia. Enough to recognize why and how you ended up acting out in this game and disappointed you had no humility in the post game to apologize for your conduct then complain about toxicity, all while perpetrating it by responding to being called out for it by calling me a child(again), because I care about the fact you griefed people who were on your faction, intentionally too.
Don't take inflammatory actions then crybully afterwards when the social consequences kick in. Thanks.
 
i personally like town vs mafia and am fine being a sheep. i never asked for sheet or a clear (though i did have a role that if it killed a mafia alias self-cleared pretty well). my issues with the format are that this game felt difficult to solve for quite a long time, and the means by which we were supposed to find mafia (either under their real aliases or under fake ones) were not very clear. there are numerous village roles which either died doing nothing, or were so situational it felt like i could never use them optimally/prove them, which is frustrating for someone who doesn't want to misvote a player i have weak evidence on.

i don't think low info villages are that fun to play. i think tommy understands a lot of our frustration was feeling like the mafia were given, or had access to, info roles far superior to ours (or someone who wasn't me/ria giving ln more info than we would've), in a plausible-enough way we did not suspect celever was mafia. there were too many tarnished-based roles and not enough ones that could more visibly interact with people. if you're not going to let us solve off alignment checking, we need to be able to solve off the roles/mech. for me, no, i don't play an OC to solve off the social game, and if the expectation is i solve off the social game more than expected, that should be communicated in signups so i know what game i am joining and how to play. when i play OC i expect to sheep for mech solving, and it took numerous days for that mech to come to fruition in this game.

if lechen had simply never disobeyed our targeting we would've never had a mech reason to vote him. yes this means they can't strongman harmony and flandrs (or they hook bluedoom) but he and sunny were only caught by results indicating they weren't where they should be. celever's role/claim was virtually uncatchable except that it was used to bolster mekkah's fake. IF the mafia did not lie and always following town's actions, they were impossible to catch. that is what frustrated ria and i for a good portion of the game, because we need them to make essentially unforced errors. someone like ag who had no way to prove his role, at all, would've been a logical first place to vote over sunny or lechen if they only ever turned up where we told them to be. but that would be wrong, and it's frustrating there was no other way to verify what any of them were. this same phenomenon was present in my game except there were some items one could get from difficult temples to eventually catch scum, and there was a situational alignment checker.

former was voted because ag had a more earnest townvibe and hydro and celever were info roles who convicted mafia early. there were only four tarnished alive and one of them HAD to be mekkah's teammate. so yes, we started with former. there is nothing wrong with asking questions but it should be clear that the question-asking he did was rubbing the leadership the wrong way by our reaction to him. we actually did go through a phase where we were convinced he had to be town due to his behavior and then circled back around because when we said "hey we're gonna try to prove you" he said "no i'm refusing," whereas ag said "oh did i help catch someone?" when we voted an alias he had a fail on. you can't say we were wrong for not picking ag or hydro first off "vibes" when former's role of 'vote negator' is a fairly classical mafia role, but we should've "vibed" him as town. the problem was we were looking at 3 players who were all town and missing the 4th who was mafia, so of course someone is going to fall into erroneous suspicion.

i did want to sheet flandrs but celever pushed back on it. i didn't question it at the time since we got charlie in the chat but i should have been a bit more forceful for flandrs' sake. he might've caught on to celever in a way i wasn't. i was tremendously grateful we got charlie in the core to offer some new perspective on what mech we were missing.

iunno i don't think i played perfectly and i've never claimed that. i do think i had logical reasons to make the suspicions and votes i did. i WAS right that there was some weird tmi happening, the source was just celever and not a mythical 9th mafia member or something lol.
 
Yeti said:
  • tarnished vote backup: this might be the singlemost troll role in the game, for the same reason as the above. it is essentially a vanilla but it has a night action. the circumstances in which this role could successfully be predicted onto a tarnished who dies the night this role targets it are slim. i guess i don't have a problem with very weak roles having actions so your village is of-size, but has no extra power, but you should consider how easy it is to actually use a role. town knowing which tarnished will die is very difficult.
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Big reason I volunteered for my power to instead be used as an interference checker. If my action failed or didn't when it wasn't supposed to or was supposed to, then it would give good information.
 
DkKoba said:
You're right that I play too much mafia. Enough to recognize why and how you ended up acting out in this game and disappointed you had no humility in the post game to apologize for your conduct then complain about toxicity, all while perpetrating it by responding to being called out for it by calling me a child(again), because I care about the fact you griefed people who were on your faction, intentionally too.
Don't take inflammatory actions then crybully afterwards when the social consequences kick in. Thanks.
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I'm sure you thought this would be a sick "own" or whatever when you were writing this, but you ironically are only proving my original point of which, again, has nothing to do with anyone's gameplay. Admitting to being terminally online playing mafia actually makes you less credible about pretty much anything, not more. Even more so when you are supposedly a grown adult :pirate:

I tried to have a rational conversation over my play in-game with you, which you responded to by insulting me. We can try again. You are welcome to explain to me exactly how I "perpetuated toxicity." How exactly did I "grief people on my faction"? I am interested in learning and improving, so by all means, please feel free to educate me. Or are you going to dodge the question again?
 
so i discussed a lot of what i'm going to say in the post-game call but i think it is probably useful to type things out for people who weren't there...

i had a lot of frustrations with this game but i don't think this setup was deeply irredeemable. although i found the interaction of low town info roles and a huge number of dummy aliases to be extremely frustrating, i don't think low info towns or noise NPCs (with a lower number) are bad by themselves, but the combination of them- along with the game being slowed down much more than it was intended to be- made things feel really slow. (i actually quite like low information towns compared to other players i think, or at least yeti who i talked about the setup to most lol.) i was very stressed out being in a position of leadership while being busy with a lot more than just the game in my personal life too, especially early when i hadn't actually proven myself more than by vibes and we had a huge drought of hitting any useful aliases

in particularly i was fairly miffed about learning the interaction my 1 shot ability had with the main day vote very late. because there was a game mechanic that also cared about day votes, i assumed it was a weak 1 use ability to combat if the mafia took over the tarnished vote (and, when malenia flipped, prevent a death from that)- so the option of using it to clear someone was not obvious to me when i first read my role, and the mafia also said they never caught onto it until we used it to sheet charlie. even tommy commented that this was the only role he thought he could've been more clear with in role PMs (i'm inclined to agree the other roles that were misread were not that confusing to me once they flipped). had i known that, i could've avoided the dilemma of choosing who to sheet with after pulsar's death altogether, since i would've been able to mechanically find a leader a lot earlier.

i think the intended use case of my role is actually a pretty cool way of finding a leader, so it's a shame that it didn't really work out. also i love announcer, i only stopped using it once i was leading because it was difficult to think of something funny to do with it when i had to spend most of my mental energy regarding this game on trying to figure things out

thanks to harmony, yeti, and charlie in particular for helping me keep my head in the game. i was fairly checked out at certain points but i tried to do my best with the situation i was in and play as clean as i could, so sorry to anyone that was not happy with that. also, thanks to celever- even though you weren't town i enjoyed especially our early discussions (which are a bit funny to look back at now). it probably would've been funny once we were down to just you to see how long it would've been before we figured you out, but i appreciate y'all saving everyone's time as well

and of course thanks to tommy, hosting is very difficult and often thankless, but even in spite of my complaints i appreciate the work that went into it and the vision you had
 
gg I had fun. I think being sheeted about 75% of the way through npc holy war meant I was not tilted at it like the rest of the village. Doing nothing for 5 nights before starting to play was 10/10 would vegetate again.

I have regrets about not questioning Celever being clear after I found his early actions scummy but I guess that’s a lesson and I was trying to take in a lot when I got added. Other than that I’m pretty happy with how I played (or didn’t), ty to everyone for playing and Tommy for hosting!
 
mfw we get our mole sheet access, submit actions with full knowledge of where town is going for multiple nights, and have to surrender

GG, unlucky game. Biggest lesson: if we add KP on both sides, don't make one permanent and the other loseable on player death

Thx for hosting Tommy I had fun. And shoutout to Former for speaking truth when nobody wanted to listen
 
I wrote up a bunch of my thoughts beforehand during like night 4, expecting the game to not last forever, and then I blinked it was over, so uh...gg!

Subclasses are a great idea that increase the potential for roles to interact with. It allows for a wider range of different roles beyond the like 10-ish roles games usually have. For Tarnished specifically there were a bunch of roles on town that interacted with the tarnished and their vote. Some of them were not as satisfying as others but the idea was there. I guess for Great Enemy that was supposed to be the NPCs but like has been said NPCs themselves weren't super interesting...I feel like you could split the subclass inspector into one that checks for Great Enemy data or something. And for Shardbearers I would've liked something like a role that allows you to give your phase shift to someone else, or something that checks your phase shift ability.

On the topic of Shardbearers/phase shifters, Tommy cleared up (in VC) that town phase shifters were meant to (or heavily consider) clear(ing) themselves as a replacement for a alliance checker, at the expense of one of their lives and being vulnerable to the mafia's (neg safeguarded) kill. Since town ended up only using this method once (with pulsar) who then sheeted townies to the best of her ability, Tommy's idea of a repeatedly rotating town leadership never came to fruition. I think if this was not the intention a bit more guidance on Tommy's part in role PMs or the game's OP would've been good...

Similarly, I would've liked to know that we were never meant to take over the Tarnished vote. We only had 2 tarnished while the town had 9, plus shifted Night Emerald, plus whatever genisu ends up doing, and then potentially more from Night Emerald detarnishing us, Ditto mayorizzling someone, etc. Most town tarnished roles were bad kills due to the weakness of their roles. The way the setup read I thought it was part of our wincon just like the main vote usually is for mafia, but here it was more like a death trap for the mafia tarnished.

That said I do really like the idea of giving town an extra vote with some bells and whistles, and these mechanics also lend themselves well to mafia inventing interesting fake claims. It might be nice to receive a little bit of host guidance on what can be fake claimed to avoid counterclaims though!

I forgot to ask if the mafia phase shifters were meant to do anything beyond wasting an extra village vote, because I feel like that mechanic was heavily town favored. Mafia phase shifted can only be expected to live one more phase, which means their shifted abilities can only be expected to live for one night at most. That makes me feel like our Death Mark backup (Lechen) and 1-time super backup (Twin) were severely undercooked since they would never be able to replace a dead Death Marker or poisoner long term, and emphasized how much of the game hinged on when our kill power was found. (But just to make this clear: it was totally our fault that they were found out as quickly as they were in the first place)

WRT NPCs I don't think they should be tried again especially not on this scale but hypothetically I think integrating them more with roles would've been a good move. Create some lore connections between certain townies and certain NPCs that allow the exchange of GE data to be more fruitful. This also adds some flavor, and allows townies to soft clean each other.

All in all I mostly had fun with this game especially when we had a sheet, planning our actions (and one time, the tarnished vote) trying to balance Celever's credibility with other people's was a neat puzzle excercise, and open gooning for a while was relieving.

Many thanks to Tommy for hosting! I commend your chill attitude about the game not playing as you planned it.

And thanks to the team that helped planning in life and death! LonelyNess was a monster as always, willing to go through 23789789 different plans, strategies, gambits and scenarios just to make sure we pick the right one (or in one unfortunate case, the wrong one), along with Lechen and Twin when available, and Celever for the most chillaxed moling I have ever witnessed. Also thanks to realiti for being willing to sub in only to find himself in a pretty doomed slot only to stick it out until the end. sunny dw about your activity man, law school's a pain and you did great on pretending to be an afk townie rather than an afk mafian.
 
Hello first off gg and thank you everyone for playing. I really like Elden Ring and wanted to make a game based on it for a while now lmao. I had many thoughts throughout the game so I probably won't get to address everything, maybe I will make a follow up.

Just to note, I appreciate there were things that people liked about this game, and things people didn't. This will be the case with every game and in general I think people enjoyed it and the type of game it was to various degrees, which again is going to be unavoidable. I am not trying to start any real serious debates about what's right or wrong but I will be offering my perspective, and the game design intention.

First to note, my favourite game type is high power and basically every game I make is higher power than this, it was intentionally lower powered and a lot of the decisions were based off the back of what people wanted removed from recent games to me these were (mostly):

1) less obvious town leadership with people sheeping etc no gameplay
2) lower power, the games scaled a bit out of control up to when I designed this game to the point people were annoyed that things got crazy not counterplay etc
3) less disruptives

For issue 1), the intention for me was that for town to get hard clears beyond limited exceptions they had to out the alias. This was tied in with the fact that if mafia aim their factional at town, they will always kill town. So basically, while town had limited ways to temporary protect a leader mafia always kind of had a way to clear it out. Town then has a chance to either, put someone else up to fill in, or diverse the power and everyone solves together, in this the tarnish vote would've been more personal, and the npcs that great enemies had would actually be more relevant to themselves.

Obviously this didn't really work out because I think people a bit arbitrarily decided 3 to lead, this was something i definitely didnt predict in celever, ariariadne and yeti. I know certain people rather hard town leader and get that, but I actually think trusting in just non clears to be town leader while not like a gaping misplay, because the game was designed to be played a bit more open, basically divested the rest of town of their ability to play for no reason. In the end that trio was basically rand accuracy, with 1/3 being mafia (celever). While I am aware of some people wanting town leader, totally get it, I do think like it poses the question to the community of what do you really want in this situation going forward, do people enjoy being sheeps to mech cleared leader, or would they rather more open discussion? It is worth considering as I believe that both design choices now have had major backlash, but there isnt really much of a middle ground between the two.

Issue 2), there has been a lot of mention of useless roles etc. I do not really believe a lot of them were useless and some of the situational ones that were "bad" roles (they were intentionally bad but not useless), were more useless due to mafia role. For example I do beleive aura guardian would've got more backups for example on charlie, had there not been a mafia mole knowing charlie is getting backed up anyways.

Again addressing question to communitee, I know more than anyone that open your role pm and getting a powerful role is exciting. Traditional I host high power games because I prefer this actually, both design wise and as a player. However, there have again been recent complaints about roles being too strong. At a certain point it reaches kind of a crossroads of, you can't simultaneous all have great roles, and keep a game not high power. There are also only so many roles in a game of mafia and I would say one of the biggest design hurdles in a large game, is actually thinking of relevant not broken roles. Bringing up historical games for example, I think laurel's game nearly everyone had fun roles (note nearly) as individual, but obviously together they create noise that people thought the game was too powerful. In a town vs mafia setting, we can look at sam's game where I think every alignment was looking at the other alignments like "wtf thats insane" constantly, and the town's power especially I feel like was so strong that they then became expected to make no mistakes because everyone had cool strong roles and as a result balance wise mistakes have to be more punishing. So yeah just going to leave the question of, how willing are people to give up having a powerful role themselves, in order to have a game as a whole not be out of control with bus drivers, vote redirects etc etc.

3) So yeah coming off recent games I think a lot of people wanted less disruptives, I love bus drivers etc but obviously watered down this time. We also had info probably previously which I think makes the game actually less playable for general population (the one thing I will stand by in the post game is that general town could've been involved more and there was little reason they were not here). The npcs, as ln rightly mentioned in the call allow you to scale up the kill power, giving more cool high power roles than otherwise, maybe this artificially nflates the game and just feels unrewarding as others already mentioned but that is the intention.

I think now with like the desired reduction of disruptives, info, killing roles leaves us in a really troubling state (which I had predicted when the bus driver hate wagon started) of slowly people are kind of wanting every role phased out of the game for being too strong. But then people also want high powered games. I am not outside of this scope obviously, there are roles I hate, as there are with everyone but I do think we are now coming to a point as a community where every role is hated by some subgroup, and hosts are discouraged to put it in or get flamed. Probably what I predict is being required is just say fuck it and deal with people flaming you if you stick a bus drive in. Everyone dislikes something but there will be games you like and some you like less, as it stands we are slowly forcing everything out of the game, to the point we have little left. I do think its a pretty big issue.

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So anyways that was stuff I wanted to change coming in, or at least the key points I wanted to hit with my vision. I will not mention the things I feel like I would change going again (though overall I feel like game vision was mostly good tbh and I was happy with balance at least for sure)

-Ria's role could've been phrased a little better. It was kind an important role and I could see how it is confusing but 1/30 I don't think is too bad. Tangent moment:

I will say every other role I think was incredibly abundantly clear, and not at all misleading. The most frustrating part of the game for me was people read what I felt was clear and just stay confused instead of asking me to clarify again. I do not think 29 of the roles could've been much clearer, but you know what its fine if you don't understand because I felt like I was very ready to explain to people if they were confused. I understand it is annoying if your teammates don't understand a role too, I myself would be frustrated as a town leader/member. However, I kind of feel like, if we cannot even let people paraphase what a role does, and even need someone to read what their action does (when its clear), like how much more can we restrict people out of the game. Reading and understanding what your role does is like, below level 0 of being involved in the game in the first place, I think this just has to be an L for town if people can't do that much unfortunately.

-Laurel's role should've activated if killed at night, I got caught in the flavour sauce of it being cool that radahn stars only fall if he gets killed by a bunch of players in the day because his boss fight in the game you summon a bunch of npcs to fight with you, my bad.

-Pregame I had all roletypes assigned to roles, (protective, damaging, disruptive, info, supprotive). I took these out because I thought it might be a bit spewy that roles interact with them in certain ways, but in hindsight this should've been included for a bit more player clarity.

-I think there could've been a bit less npcs. I do not think like 95 percent of the time they are as big a problem as they were this game. Mafia early game player kind of killed their kp to get sheeted, then killed town kp. Town also had obviously quite a few unnecessary kills on town npcs, plus the npc arsonist was mostly wasted. I think there is like loads of elements here stacked to make the game drag out in worst timeline ever, but this was kind of player driven and while I could've helped a bit to make it impossible to become this bad it was so incredibly unlikely and unfortunate lmao.

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Outside of the setup, I just want to kind of address host flame. So to start there was actually very few people who flamed me this game. I actually got more support messages than flame which was cute. Annoyance in mafia games is standard, and so are throw away comments of "this sucks" but I do think smogon has a huge problem with over stepping the line. Personally, I have hosted and played so many mafia games that I look at them myself and feel fine enough to review and see where I went wrong and what would be best to change, so it rolls off maybe a bit easier than others? But it still obviously is not nice lmao, and I do think people should try check themselves more often even if its hard.

I say this mostly not for myself, but for others too. So don't assume this is even in reference to elden ring mafia. I have lots of experience and obviously am secure in my game design so its not so bad for me. I have some frame of reference, but I think this type of thing can be particularly bad when targetted at newer hosts, who maybe aren't as sure how bad their game truly was, because obviously everything has different scales of bad vs good. Even if there are design choices you disagree with I think sometimes you just have to accept its not how you would do it, but its not the end of the word so long as the host isnt being malicious. Obviously a lot of work goes into these games, some will be more balanced than others, some will be more enjoyed by others but lots of people have lots of different valid povs of what makes a game good. Everyone is developing and learning as a host too and I think its actually most important for those of us who are most experienced as hosts, to be more supportive and offer constructive criticism to others, rather than flame them out in a toxic manner. So while its easy to say "well x understands why I did y and was mad in hindsight". Maybe this is true, but it is never nice and oftentimes hosts are getting flamed, but can't even defend thmselves without getting into spew. Hosts are in a very vulnerable spot, because they are trying to protect game integrity (as well as opening up their artistic vision in a way to everyone else to hopefully enjoy). Please remember not to take advantage of such vulnerability going forward, our hosts are important and do a great service to the community for us to enjoy (or just play) games of mafia.

Thanks everyone again for playing the game, if there is anything else people would like me to address let me know and I will probably do so!
 
i think the kicker with my role’s phrasing is that i don’t think i would even call the way it was written incorrect so much as that it was a very weird interaction with the main vote that doesn’t work the same as in basically any game i’ve ever played. so i totally understand how you got into that situation, it’s just really unfortunate that my role was waaaay better than i thought especially when it did exactly what i was looking for at a certain point of time
 
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