Forum Mafia GM
January 30th, 2015, 09:00 AM
rough draft
Scum:
As you all probably noticed, scum roles/factions were very strong this game. We did this intentionally because we feel that in many FMs the balance is skewed in favor of the town to the point where the game is less about answering the question "Who will win?", but rather "When will town win?" In this game, we wanted to ensure it was the former, so we made scum strong in order to really put pressure on the town to stop them.
As I mentioned in dead chat, Phoenix King might very well be the single most powerful role that has ever existed in a mafia (at least on this site). Immune to detection, night death, AND can survive a lynch. Not to mention the arsonist functionality and the night chat with 5 other people who each have abilities of their own. And the Mass Murderer lives up to his name- he doesn't stop at automatically killing roleblockers that target him- he also killed attackers and then sprees at his house, killing anyone else who is unfortunate enough to visit him the night of the attack, as town learned on night 5.
Hama was easily the weakest evil role/faction, relying on charges in order to act and having no ability to kill on her own. But we balanced this by giving her a win condition that enabled her to win without being the sole survivor or even eliminating town. And the faction she did have to eliminate (fire nation) was also an enemy of the town, so she could rely on town to do at least some of the dirty work for her. So though she may have lacked raw power, she made up for it by having an easier win condition.
Town:
When we were deciding what roles to give the town, we already knew basically what scum was going to look like, so we tried to give town tools to battle them. We decided the Gaang's guaranteed roles were pretty good, but decided to also include a starting lookout and blacksmith to give the town some extra power early on. We also gave Aang some temporary immunity this time around so as to prevent a repeat of last game where he was killed early on and only managed to give out one new role, not to mention Iroh, who was basically a second Aang. This seemed pretty strong for town, so we balanced it by giving the mafia secondary and tertiary roles so that there was increased risk for Aang and Iroh- if they targeted scum, not only would they reveal themselves, but they would also make scum stronger by giving them a new ability.
This turned out pretty well- both Aang and Iroh managed to give out a decent number of powers. And their targets only overlapped twice (more on that later) which resulted in a nice spread of power.
All in all I think our goals for balance this game worked out pretty well. The game took the standard 10 days to complete and at the end every faction had a similar chance to win.
Truthseer
We wanted Toph's role to be something befitting the best earthbender of all time that didn't involve jailing. Thus the truthseer was born. It took us a while to figure out how to balance the role. We brainstormed a few ideas before landing on the iteration that made it into the game. We decided it was pretty balanced because both town and scum have reasons to lie, so finding a lie would not necessarily make that person scum (unless...), but Toph would be able to use this to gain information which could potentially lead to finding scum.
Of course, not long after the setup was posted I had a question in my inbox about how the truthseer role was "gamebreaking" (yes, they actually said that) because people could post "I am town" and she could check those posts and find out players' alignment. I replied that this was in no way "gamebreaking" because that would make Toph into a sheriff. A role that has been around as long as mafia itself and is included in nearly every FM. And she would be even weaker than a typical sheriff because she would rely on people to make posts specifically for her to check their alignment AND they would have to do that every single day. If anyone forgets or chooses not to do it, too bad. She can't find out their alignment. Even after pointing this out, he still seemed to think it was "breaking the game" to use Toph in this fashion. To be honest, this is one thing that disappointed me about this game. I feel that truthseer was a very interesting new idea for a role that had a lot of possibilities in terms of the information it could gain.
It could tell whether or not someone's role claim was true. Or if they really got the feedback they said they did. She could even potentially find out if a player was blackmailed. That's a lot of utility for a single role. But in the end, the town committed to making her a sheriff. This was not very surprising given: 1) the aformentioned question about how "gamebreaking" it is and 2) the fact that using it as a sheriff is more consistent which does have some appeal, especially for town, but it was still a bit disappointing to me since I was really hoping to see more of the other stuff mentioned above.
Scum:
As you all probably noticed, scum roles/factions were very strong this game. We did this intentionally because we feel that in many FMs the balance is skewed in favor of the town to the point where the game is less about answering the question "Who will win?", but rather "When will town win?" In this game, we wanted to ensure it was the former, so we made scum strong in order to really put pressure on the town to stop them.
As I mentioned in dead chat, Phoenix King might very well be the single most powerful role that has ever existed in a mafia (at least on this site). Immune to detection, night death, AND can survive a lynch. Not to mention the arsonist functionality and the night chat with 5 other people who each have abilities of their own. And the Mass Murderer lives up to his name- he doesn't stop at automatically killing roleblockers that target him- he also killed attackers and then sprees at his house, killing anyone else who is unfortunate enough to visit him the night of the attack, as town learned on night 5.
Hama was easily the weakest evil role/faction, relying on charges in order to act and having no ability to kill on her own. But we balanced this by giving her a win condition that enabled her to win without being the sole survivor or even eliminating town. And the faction she did have to eliminate (fire nation) was also an enemy of the town, so she could rely on town to do at least some of the dirty work for her. So though she may have lacked raw power, she made up for it by having an easier win condition.
Town:
When we were deciding what roles to give the town, we already knew basically what scum was going to look like, so we tried to give town tools to battle them. We decided the Gaang's guaranteed roles were pretty good, but decided to also include a starting lookout and blacksmith to give the town some extra power early on. We also gave Aang some temporary immunity this time around so as to prevent a repeat of last game where he was killed early on and only managed to give out one new role, not to mention Iroh, who was basically a second Aang. This seemed pretty strong for town, so we balanced it by giving the mafia secondary and tertiary roles so that there was increased risk for Aang and Iroh- if they targeted scum, not only would they reveal themselves, but they would also make scum stronger by giving them a new ability.
This turned out pretty well- both Aang and Iroh managed to give out a decent number of powers. And their targets only overlapped twice (more on that later) which resulted in a nice spread of power.
All in all I think our goals for balance this game worked out pretty well. The game took the standard 10 days to complete and at the end every faction had a similar chance to win.
Truthseer
We wanted Toph's role to be something befitting the best earthbender of all time that didn't involve jailing. Thus the truthseer was born. It took us a while to figure out how to balance the role. We brainstormed a few ideas before landing on the iteration that made it into the game. We decided it was pretty balanced because both town and scum have reasons to lie, so finding a lie would not necessarily make that person scum (unless...), but Toph would be able to use this to gain information which could potentially lead to finding scum.
Of course, not long after the setup was posted I had a question in my inbox about how the truthseer role was "gamebreaking" (yes, they actually said that) because people could post "I am town" and she could check those posts and find out players' alignment. I replied that this was in no way "gamebreaking" because that would make Toph into a sheriff. A role that has been around as long as mafia itself and is included in nearly every FM. And she would be even weaker than a typical sheriff because she would rely on people to make posts specifically for her to check their alignment AND they would have to do that every single day. If anyone forgets or chooses not to do it, too bad. She can't find out their alignment. Even after pointing this out, he still seemed to think it was "breaking the game" to use Toph in this fashion. To be honest, this is one thing that disappointed me about this game. I feel that truthseer was a very interesting new idea for a role that had a lot of possibilities in terms of the information it could gain.
It could tell whether or not someone's role claim was true. Or if they really got the feedback they said they did. She could even potentially find out if a player was blackmailed. That's a lot of utility for a single role. But in the end, the town committed to making her a sheriff. This was not very surprising given: 1) the aformentioned question about how "gamebreaking" it is and 2) the fact that using it as a sheriff is more consistent which does have some appeal, especially for town, but it was still a bit disappointing to me since I was really hoping to see more of the other stuff mentioned above.